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How many .com domain names are unused?

singaporedatacompany.com

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Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#21

Post by c22 »

zizee wrote: post #16
whttheuuu wrote: post #5

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

Perhaps a better solution would be for each subsequent domain cost $1 extra to renew. I.e. your 11th domain would cost you $10 extra per year, your 101st domain a hundred extra a year. I don't have a big problem with people holding onto a half dozen domains for years at a time and not making much use of them, but companies owning thousands of domains as speculation? F that noise.

This seems pretty hard to enforce. What if instead the fee per domain just increased by a dollar per year? The first few dozen years shouldn't be too onerous for those who aren't squatting on a mountain of domains and if your domain is 50+ years old maybe you've found a way to monetize it.

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#22

Post by munk-a »

zizee wrote: post #16
whttheuuu wrote: post #5

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

Perhaps a better solution would be for each subsequent domain cost $1 extra to renew. I.e. your 11th domain would cost you $10 extra per year, your 101st domain a hundred extra a year. I don't have a big problem with people holding onto a half dozen domains for years at a time and not making much use of them, but companies owning thousands of domains as speculation? F that noise.

Holding companies would break an approach like this very quickly - it's likely that the cost burden of this change would hit smaller companies much quicker than large ones.

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#23

Post by binarysolo »

dsl wrote: post #11

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…

Also interested in what you use to park your extra domains. I have a dozen or so domains of former/future ideas and would love to at least have them maintain themselves. :)

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#24

Post by munk-a »

whttheuuu wrote: post #5

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

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.

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#25

Post by nsgi »

binarysolo wrote: post #23
dsl wrote: post #11

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…

Also interested in what you use to park your extra domains. I have a dozen or so domains of former/future ideas and would love to at least have them maintain themselves. :)

Something like Netlify would do the trick. Zero cost or maintenance once you set it up with AdSense code, and better than using some parking service that would probably want to keep some of the revenue.

https://www.netlify.com/

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#26

Post by asaph »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #7

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…

> .. dyndns turned evil.

Care to elaborate?

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#27

Post by libria »

dsl wrote: post #11

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…

It's just a short name for that category which he specifically includes parked domains and even recognizes "Some of these domains likely have some non-web use".

Call it "Not overtly used" if you want.

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#28

Post by madsushi »

asaph wrote: post #26
banana_giraffe wrote: post #7

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…

> .. dyndns turned evil. Care to elaborate?

Since they stopped offering a free plan, I imagine. I just paid them the money, it's worth it.

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#29

Post by banana_giraffe »

asaph wrote: post #26
banana_giraffe wrote: post #7

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…

> .. dyndns turned evil. Care to elaborate?

In the grand scheme of things, it's not the evilest thing to have ever happened. At some point the Windows auto-updater decided to push a new feature that changes the network DNS settings to make them point to some Oracle DNS server. If you undo the changes without disabling the "feature" in the app, it'll reset them for you. It was done with the claim of speeding up DNS lookup or somesuch.

It's a checkbox, and no doubt it would remember the setting if I changed it, but the idea an app would change my DNS settings (which, in my case broke an internal app that was admittedly fragile to begin with) without my permission was enough for me to cancel my DynDNS account there and then while I cobbled together a replacement.

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