Thinking about registering a .com.....

It may be getting a lot harder

[gpmgroup]

It seems a handful of companies are registering hundreds of thousands of .com's everyday.

For example today 430,661 new .com's were registered and 402,094 deleted.

What appears to happen is they register the .com, setup a site and see if there is any traffic. If there is they keep the name if not they let it drop within a few days and that way they don't have to pay for the ICANN registration I believe.

[shman]

Where are these stats coming from?

[Andreals]

[#*$!...]

#*$!=#*$!

[Andreals]

It appears that forum rules forbid the coherent transmission of URLs...

so sorry ==> whois dot sc

[thinkaholic]

A domain name will not "drop" after a few days of use. Once a domain name is paid for, most registrars will not refund them. Registrars are charged a fee to register each domain name through their system. I think it's like $6 per domain name...and it goes to Network Solutions.

Yes, there are a few major players out there that register hundreds of domain names every day. These guys depend on previous traffic to make money. They have some of the best type-in domain names out there. You'll come across them pretty often. They look like search engines and have related links, but each link either is a direct click to a site or a search term that produces paid results. These are called "scraper sites".

Overture and Google both tie into this market and it can pay off very well for the domain name owner. Many receive 50% per click. Google Ultsearch sometime and read about the guy that makes 6 figures A DAY doing this.

[Ozhy]

Or maybe it's time to consider registering something else than the usual, old school, boring dot com ... Know about del.icio.us? It proves that you can make a successful name and brand over an non dot com domain.

Ok, this is not to be taken *too* seriously, since I can imagine why a serious business sometimes would need a dot com and nothing else. But nonetheless, I'm convinced other TLD's have interesting potentials.

<Sorry, no personal URLs.
See Terms of Service [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 11:44 pm (utc) on May 30, 2005]

[Laker]

textthinkaholic wrote:

Registrars are charged a fee to register each domain name through their system. I think
it's like $6 per domain name...and it goes to Network Solutions.

Network Solutions is not a Registry, it is a Registrar.

You may be thinking of VeriSign.

[gpmgroup]

Yes, there are a few major players out there that register hundreds of domain names every day.

The company which registered the most yesterday registered 197,385 closely followed by a company which registered 191,989 .com's!

Those same companies also allowed 82,859 and 167,728 .coms to delete respectively.

[Edwin]

Yes, some registrars seem to be able to take advantage of a short "window of opportunity" to test the traffic to a domain by registering it, parking it for 48 hours or so and then deleting it if it doesn't meet whatever criteria they've set up. Seems to be a private deal i.e. only open to registrar insiders, not the general public.