
How many .com domain names are unused? - jekor
https://singaporedatacompany.com/blog/how-many-domain-names-are-unused
======
zanny
I'm not really well informed about the politics of DNS at the top, but I've
always had the impression ICANN has been grossly negligent / corrupted over
the last twenty years.

At the end of the day there is profound capital interest in making name
records unfair and noncompetitive in order to rent seek fortunes off the
Internet and I see no indication ICANN is anything but compromised by those
interests in the way they hand out TLDs and enable registrars to operate as
for profit corporations. Nothing about a database translating human readable
strings to IP addresses should be a damn profit center.

I'm surprised the EFF, FSF, etc haven't ever shown interest in replacing
ICANN's registrar model with something that enables registration without
squatting, doesn't let anyone rent seek a fortune off of naming things, or
create profit incentives that leads to the mess where some things are named
strangely because someone is trying to extort money for it.

There are some edge technologies like namecoin and IPNS that seem to be trying
to approach this problem in novel ways but its a shame we don't have a fair
consensus model on naming things that actually works.

~~~
austincheney
This is mathematically simple to fix.

Charge US$0.50 per month ($6 per year) for every domain reservation regardless
of who is reserving. The fee must be charged per month and not per year, which
intentionally results in greater maintenance overhead.

I don't care if you are a registrar, government, charity, school, or whatever.
US$0.50 each and every month for each and every name. Registrars can slap
whatever markup they want on top of that. The free market will lower the price
where competition matters and raise the price where demand is huge for a
specified name.

If you are holding 100,000 domain names and doing nothing but serving ads on
them you better hope you are generating greater than $800,000 (conservative
estimate) in advertising revenue off those domains. That number is the cost of
reserving the name plus your business expenses to maintain those names and the
associated advertising content. I find this scenario to not likely to be
profitable.

Unfortunately this solution won't work in reality, because everybody will
bitch about their business interests and self-justifying political reasons.

~~~
dorgo
Advertisers often pay 3€ - 5€ to google for one click. If your 100,000 domains
are not complete garbage, you should easily get a million out of it.

~~~
Double_a_92
> 3€ - 5€

Isn't that for 1000 clicks?

~~~
isostatic
Apparently not

[https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/07/06/average-
cost-p...](https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/07/06/average-cost-per-
click)

> Below are the 97 countries represented in the map, in order of highest
> average cost per click to lowest average cost per click, _compared to the US
> average CPC, which is between $1 and $2 on the Search network._

~~~
Double_a_92
Now I'm unsure if each individual click is actually billed for that much. Or
if that's a sum / average of all the advertising costs until someone finally
clicks.

~~~
dorgo
It is what Google gets when somebody/something clicks on an ad in SERPs.

------
computator
Can a domain name registrar register a domain name _for themselves_ for free
or for a minimal fee? What about Verisign -- if they registered ".com" domain
names _for themselves_ , who would they even pay since there is no one above
them? Seriously, does anyone know the answer to this? I've never found an
authoritative answer.

I've wondered if domain name registrars are speculating in the domain name
market themselves. Perhaps even insidiously grabbing domain names that you've
shown an interest in. Maybe millions of domain names are reserved by the
registrars themselves!

~~~
rootusrootus
Wasn't godaddy or someone like them doing exactly that, a number of years ago?
I seem to recall a situation where you'd go to their site and search for a
domain, and if you didn't buy it, then the next day it would mysteriously show
as no longer available, but purchasable.

~~~
bigiain
It's called domain name front running. GoDaddy have repeatedly been accused of
it, as have many other registrars...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running)

~~~
xfitm3
I think this specific process is referred to as domain tasting. Front running
is using insider information, such as whois logs, while tasting is actively
registering domains and measuring how much traffic the domain gets.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting)

------
dsl
Just because a domain has ads on it or no webserver, does not mean it is
unused.

I have quite a few domains I use for email and such that I park with ads. They
make me $20-$30 a month and I still get full use of the domain for what I need
it for.

Edit: People are asking what I use. DomainAdvertising.com. When I originally
signed up with them you had to have thousands of domains (which I have sold
off), I have no idea what the requirements are now.

~~~
techsupporter
> Just because a domain has ads on it or no webserver, does not mean it is
> unused.

Yep. I have two very old domains, obtained back when domains were a) free, b)
referred to as "delegated" from hostmaster, and c) placed in service by
pulling the Very Special Form(tm) from ftp.internic.net and filling it out and
e-mailing it to hostmaster and hoping you didn't delete a stray space in there
along the way thus causing the hostmaster-bot to yell at you versus delegating
your requested name in two or three weeks.

I've had them for so long that they crop up in weird places and one of them
has been my e-mail domain for over two decades. Neither has a web site or
other "normal" services on it. Once or twice a year, I'll get an offer to buy
the three-character one (I've replied to every single one with "sure, you can
send the cashier's check to [address]" and none ever do). Also once or twice
per year, I'll get either a nice e-mail asking for the other domain--it is a
common word that some historical groups like to use--or a flame mail
complaining that I'm "camping" on the domain and being mad that I won't hand
it over.

~~~
joezydeco
_placed in service by pulling the Very Special Form(tm) from ftp.internic.net_

Man, those were the days, weren't they? I remember being really proud of
having a _two digit_ alias with Hostmaster...

------
markovbot
I'm surprised that such a large percentage of domains are registered with
GoDaddy. What leads people to pick them? They're such a shitty registrar,
every time I have to deal with them it's awful.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
It's trustworthy and their domain management tools, particularly for dealing
with large numbers of domains, is on point. I've transferred to other
registrars before, and am moving some of my less critical domains to
Cloudflare for the cost savings currently[1]. But my main domains will remain
with GoDaddy for the foreseeable future.

Oh, and they have 24/7 phone support, that at least, last time I had to call,
was US-based. I don't truly trust anyone who doesn't have good phone support.
Ticket systems are great and all for low priority requests, but it's too easy
for a place with only a ticket system to handle you in a low priority way.

[1]The transfer process is straightforward and the price can't be beat, but
their domain management features are still incredibly immature. You can't have
name servers set that aren't Cloudflare's, every time you go to domain
registration, it wants you to transfer ALL of your domains. And bulk
management of domains on Cloudflare is nonexistent: You can't even find the
expiration/renewal dates of your domains on Cloudflare without visiting the
page for each one individually. It's actually easier to find the expiration
dates for all your domains that are _not_ on Cloudflare (on the Domain
Registration page). I do like it but they have work to do.

~~~
Meekro
Just curious, how many domains do you have and what kinds of bulk management
tools do you need?

I've been very happy with Cloudflare's registrar myself, even though they
aren't always the cheapest[1]. Cloudflare just silently auto-renews all of my
domains so I never have to think about when they're going to expire. And I
don't mind the lack of nameservers since I can't think of a reason to use non-
cloudflare nameservers for any of my domains.

[1] Namecheap offers .io for $32 (not a promo, standard price) whereas
Cloudflare charges $45.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
About 20-30 at any given time. I expect to be able to see the list of domains
I own, when they expire, and if auto-renew is on or off from one convenient
panel.

Also "just silently auto-renews" is not an okay behavior for me either. Even
when I have auto-renew on, GoDaddy sends me email notices around renewal time
for any of my domains. I like to manually renew them a bit early to ensure
there's no problems with payment processing. Obviously I have like a year
until any of my Cloudflare-held domains renew, but if I don't get email
notices in advance, I will likely look at transferring them away. Proper
notice of account/billing activity is a must for trustworthy service.

For one, my host auto-configures a lot of features on the DNS for my domains.
Cloudflare imports it, obviously, when I transfer over, but if my host changes
something, Cloudflare isn't going to get it, and I don't even have the option
to change my name server provider even temporarily for troubleshooting
purposes. That's a big flaw, and Cloudflare will need to fix it to keep me.

I don't have any .io domains, but my understanding is Cloudflare keeps
literally nothing for any of their domains, so presumably Namecheap was able
to cut a better deal with the registry.

------
macittuna
On [https://dofo.com](https://dofo.com) we have all this data and more, you
can check it freely.

By using dozens of filters, you can refine the results and see whatever you
want.

For example, 66,237 .com domain names contain "coin" and are listed for sale
on marketplaces:
[https://dofo.com/search/?contains=coin&on_sale=y&extension=c...](https://dofo.com/search/?contains=coin&on_sale=y&extension=com)

You can also check the popularity of any keyword on the trends page:
[https://dofo.com/trends/keyword/coin](https://dofo.com/trends/keyword/coin)
It says, how popular is the keyword, how many registered domain names exist
with that keyword, what percentage of these domain names are used actively as
a website and more.

As for the registrars; yes Godaddy is the first one with about ~70 million
domain names under management and Namecheap and Tucows are following it:
[https://dofo.com/registrars](https://dofo.com/registrars)

Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder of dofo.com

~~~
Tepix
You may want to fix the headline "we work with the bests"

~~~
macittuna
Thanks, you're right :) We will fix it today.

------
hanoz
We've got to the stage now where if you've got a handful of .coms sharing a
server, they'd have to be pretty substantial sites before your hosting costs
would exceed your domain renewal fees. That's one hell of a market failure.

~~~
tedunangst
Huh? $10/year doesn't buy all that much hosting.

~~~
zamadatix
Considering the site:server ratio for 99% of the web it's far above
$10/y/server

------
jchallis
I'm shocked by the lack of porn on the Internet. Gambling appears to be a much
more popular activity.

~~~
jmts
Though I have absolutely no evidence to support this, I suspect that gambling
doesn't suffer the same, uh.. stamina issues, that porn probably does. I
assume that the sustained stream of small amounts of currency would easily add
up to more revenue for gambling than porn, resulting a larger market.

------
banana_giraffe
I'd be curious how many domain names are used, but not for the web or email.
No idea how to measure this, and I'm sure it's tiny.

For instance, I have a .io domain I use as my own little personal dynamic dns
service since dyndns turned evil. The TLD doesn't do anything interesting, and
any web pages served by the subdomains are done on nonstandard ports, so if
this study scanned .io domains, they'd classify my domain as not in use, when
it very much is.

~~~
asaph
> .. dyndns turned evil.

Care to elaborate?

~~~
computator
I recently quit DynDNS after many years of use because of sheer frustration. I
dropped my paid subscription because their Mac OSX updater hasn't been working
correctly for years. It would forget its settings and/or fail to update. I
filed a bug report with DynDNS and spoke to their tech support, and it never
got solved. (I suppose I could have found a third party updater, but I
expected their own updater to work.)

~~~
sadris
Hurricane Electric does free DNS hosting and supports dynamic DNS

------
jcoffland
Excellent research! Finding available and meaningful domain names is a big
problem. One solution is to chose a non-.com TLD. There are many but it's
still an unpopular choice. I believe this is changing and other TLD will
become more popular as .com names become more limited. With all the TLDs out
there it becomes cost prohibitive to buy them all.

List of TLDs: [http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-
domain.txt](http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt)

------
lifeisstillgood
Aside from anything else, there is a lot of work out into this - it's a pretty
robust piece of research, and is (I assume) a fairly good calling card as
there are many business questions that can only be answered with this sort of
skill set / stubbornness

------
YjSe2GMQ
I was hoping to see there a block with unregistered domain names.

One could do it by, for example, training a Markov chain/neural network to
spew out (sample) domains, and then see how many are currently registered, to
compute the general XXXX.com space utilization fraction.

This approach would be powered by a more sensible, IMHO, probability
distribution than, say, taking all domain names with up to 30 {a-z0-9}
characters with uniform probabilities.

------
prickledpear
One intriguing proposal to limit domain name squatting is "Harberger
Taxation"[1]

Under this scheme, every owner of a domain would declare a value for the
domains they own, and pay a percentage of that value as a tax (replacing the
current annual registration fees).

Owners are incentivized to post an accurate value for their domain because
they must sell their domain for the price they list if anyone offers to buy at
that price.

While it makes sense in theory, I think there are some practical problems that
would have to be addressed before such a system could be put into use. For
example, what stops a company with a large bankroll from squashing competitors
by purchasing their domain?

[1] -
[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494)

~~~
giancarlostoro
> While it makes sense in theory, I think there are some practical problems
> that would have to be addressed before such a system could be put into use.
> For example, what stops a company with a large bankroll from squashing
> competitors by purchasing their domain?

They don't have to sell if the offer sucks.

~~~
prickledpear
The idea is that if I'm a startup that owns google-disruptor.com, I have to
declare a value for that domain name (let's say $100,000), and pay a
percentage of that value as a tax. I'm then obligated to sell the domain to
anyone who is willing to pay $100,000. This prevents me from undervaluing the
domain.

Since Google has a much larger bankroll than me, they can purchase the domain
for $100,000, and revalue the domain at $500,000 -- out of my price range.

~~~
GilbertErik
Since Google has a much larger bankroll than you, if they decided that they
wanted prickledpear.com, wouldn't you have to sell it to them, or any other
party with deep enough pockets?

~~~
prickledpear
Yes, that is the problem I mentioned in the original comment that I'm not sure
how to solve :)

------
spking
I own nibble.com and rolled my own very simple static "parked" page using
Bootstrap and an Escrow.com button.

In my opinion the parking services like Sedo etc. aren't worth it just for
capturing sales leads...the commission is too high.

~~~
jlgaddis
Just in the last few days, I've been looking for something simple like this to
put on userhelp.com, thanks!

------
3xblah
"4\. Not all records in the zone file are valid domains. Some do not have a
WHOIS record and may act as honeypots to catch people distributing and using
zone files without permission."

It has been a while since I looked at the com zone file access ageement but as
I recall the most substantial restriction was on redistribution.

A wee bit of web searching shows there are still plenty of non-official
sources selling zone files.

Perhaps it's just me but sometimes I think the number is increasing.

Are the honeypots designed to catch these sellers and stop them from selling?

Does Verisign enforce the ZFA agreement?

Maybe all Verisign can do is revoke the access of the licensee who breached
their agreement?

------
rjf72
Domain registration is one of the most perfect use scenarios for a blockchain
type system. It would be entirely decentralized meaning no party has any
unfair advantage which leads to these sort of systems where players obtain
massive amounts of domains for non-market prices and then sit on them
indefinitely relying on the occasional way over market price sale to justify
the business model. And while views may vary here, I think it would also
generally be a positive for governments to no longer be able to strip
individuals or companies of their domains, such as for instance SciHub.

One practical problem in the early stages is that various domains could be
snagged and used to extort the companies/individuals who 'rightfully' own them
for unreasonably large sums of money if they wanted access to their domains.
This issue could be resolved by premining and mirroring the current domain
system before public launch with domains transferred to their rightful owners
upon proof of ownership akin to the systems used by Let's Encrypt.

Probably the most challenging problem would be in determining how many domain
registration coins would be generated per unit time. Too few and prices
inflate too high and destroy the system. Too many and prices deflate and the
coins become worthless - destroying motivation to keep mining, in turn again
destroying the system. Lots of possible solutions though. Fun problem!

~~~
lunchables
[https://handshake.org/](https://handshake.org/)

------
leowoo91
"There are currently 137 million .com domain names registered."

But how many is regularly visited today by most of the population? A good 10k
max?

~~~
gohwell
Alexa can give you an idea of the most popular sites.
[https://www.alexa.com/topsites](https://www.alexa.com/topsites)

~~~
marcosdumay
Well, there are 500 on the top 500. I don't think Alexa goes low enough to
answer the GP.

------
jdlyga
www.steam.com. They've been holding out for almost a decade trying to get
money from Valve.

~~~
zanny
Its a shame Armenia controls .am because ste.am isn't in use right now.

------
air7
Domain names are incredibly underpriced (I'm referring to the "good" ones).
With the evolution of the internet, where startups are now willing to spend
10k-100k on a domain, it makes no sense that its original cost was 10$, and
that insentivises speculators.

If prime domains would cost 100$ or even 1000$ per year it wouldn't affect a
running business much, but would almost completely eliminate the viablilty of
domain squatting. And if you're an individual you'll still have many other
options.

This could be applied to the entire COM TLD (it does stand for commercial
after all) or only for parts of it under some criteria (like length etc).

------
GlitchMr
Just because a domain may appear to be unused, it doesn't necessarily mean it
is unused.

For instance, I have a domain I use as a file hosting which I can link to when
I want to share something (I used to use Imgur for this purpose before, but
frankly I don't trust any image host at this point, so I set up nginx to host
a single directory). As you need to know the file names to download them, the
domain would appear to be unused.

Although now that I look at I suppose I do explain its purpose, so here is
that: [https://i.xfix.pw/](https://i.xfix.pw/).

~~~
lunchables
And what percentage of domains do you think represent use cases like this? I
don't think it significantly changes the statistical analysis. Sure, there are
some tiny fraction of a percent of weird uses from people like us, but it's
hardly worth even mentioning.

------
robterrin
Anybody who is interested by the economics of domain names should read Henry
George who laid all this out over one hundred years ago in Progress and
Poverty. Domains are just the new frontier since we discovered and claimed all
physical land. The 1990's were a land grab and now we are entering the period
of calcification.

------
pcmaffey
I wonder how many of the 25% newly registered domains were registered for the
first time ever?

------
platz
What is the statistical power and what makes the sample "random"?

------
jccalhoun
It seems like it has been this way for a long time. I remember back in the
dialup days in college sitting around trying out random urls and even then
many of them were ad sites that were for sale.

------
coldacid
That reminded me, I have domains to renew. I better take care of that.

------
techaddict009
"Domain Usage, from a sample of 2,188 domains" isnt that to low sized sample
to analyse data of more than 20 million domains?

~~~
YjSe2GMQ
It should be fine - strong law of big numbers. They even computed some
confidence intervals (99% CI ±3%), but it's not precisely explained how, just
references a paper.

------
Tepix
Quote from the research:

> the crawling server was only configured for IPv4

He may have misqualified 11% or more of those domains.

~~~
lunchables
I seriously doubt 11% of domains are IPv6 only, but I'd love to see someone do
some research on it. I would assume its only a fraction of a percent that ONLY
responds via IPv6.

------
danillonunes
All the ones that I want!

------
whttheuuu
Domain renewals should be priced higher. $500/yr, $1000/yr, $5000/yr would
prevent squatters.

~~~
munk-a
I absolutely disagree, but I think it is reasonable for domain authorities of
various gTLDs to incorporate company names into domain name rights a bit more
- if your company is FooBar and foobar.com is taken you may get some legal
advantage in any efforts to secure it, this could just shift the domain name
squatting issue to a company name squatting issue though. And, I'm also making
the assumption that we're fine with pushing personal pages and other domain
uses off on a different gTLD.

~~~
techsupporter
> And, I'm also making the assumption that we're fine with pushing personal
> pages and other domain uses off on a different gTLD.

This is a sure sign of getting old, in the vein of "old man yells at cloud,"
but you can have my personal domain that's been registered in a common gTLD
long enough for it to buy its own beer when you pry it out of my registrar's
hands.

Yeah, it sucks to have come along at the end of the landrush and all of the
good spots are taken. That's, sadly, life when it comes to scarce things like
that. I sure wish I'd been alive in the 40s or old enough in the 80s to buy
waterfront property in Ballard when it was cheap but that time has passed,
too.

~~~
sbov
This is one benefit of having a unique name. My good friend, "Robert Miller"
is out of luck. Me, well, yeah. Only one person with my name in the United
States, possibly the world.

