Fast forward to a few months ago, and I let one other domain expire, it was for a brand I was creating, the domain was a made up word and a squatter registered that domain as soon as it expired, assuming some service registered it without any human supervision as that made up word holds no value to anyone else and I consciously decided to let it expire.
Since I made up that word and it was 14 characters long, are they just going to keep it for 20+ years?
This just made me wonder how many vacant domains we have today, that it must still be (unethical and) profitable and if it’s time to do something about it?
* Buying up a limited resource with the intent to sell it to someone else later
* Often is good land that could be used by someone else to create value instead
* Lots sit unused for years waiting for a buyer
* Land in "just the right spot" for me is being "squatted" by someone trying to flip it
Do you have the same opinion about that business, and if not, for what reasons?
The difference to real estate business lies in the fact that it is much more diverse and way harder to manage.
Domains are managed by one organization, ICANN (with respective tld management), which facilitates a policy change. We also see changes in digital space progress much faster.
There are approx. 600'000 new domain names registered over Verisign in Q3 2020 alone [1]. In the future, the significance of the problem will only grow.
* Take a risk proportional to the value of the asset.
* Pay taxes proportional to the value of the asset.
That's a little different from waiting for a domain to revert to the registrar and then paying $8/year for it.
Isn't this a fundamental principle of business? How are they also not creating value, if value is more or less defined as money earned?
The web is literally dominated by like 5 companies, and every smaller company's stupid 'mission' is to build some platform for everyone else to 'create value' and change the world with their SaaS. Maybe I'm just cynical, and I understand that you disagree with sort of scummy extortion tactics, but the wording you chose seems to me to already be what the web is.
Bandits make money by robbing people. Are they "creating value", as money is being earned?
Some means of earning money never help anyone but the people doing it, and hurt everyone else.
That is all business, but especially tech. FAANG all extract money from content/value creators that they have captured.
Not everyone is going to get a $500k/year job and stock options with big tech, and fewer will get millions in funding to start their own startups…but a domain for under $10 that might be used and/or flipped for a little profit? That seems much more ethical than most big tech.
Just... why? How could this even be a good idea?
But I just checked, and it’s available now. (Not squatted.)
I think some people run systems to buy up domains that expire, in case the expiration is a mistake. Then they can make a few bucks selling the domain back to the dummy who let it expire accidentally.
There’s a limit to how much you can make doing this, though, as any big company probably has a trademark on their domain. And if they do, they can just ask ICANN to seize it from you.
I think that’s different from someone who registered a common word (or many) and holds onto them, hoping to sell them to people who want them.
The domain squatting business is kind of like poker. You have a slow bleed of costs from annual domain fees (the ante in poker) and few deals to offset that (winning a hand in poker). Over time you have to either score some big deals, or eventually cut your costs. This limits the utility of squatting random nonsense domains for very long.
The domain for a brand name of a product line of my father's small business lapsed when I forgot to renew it, and it was registered by HugeDomains with an asking price of US $2600. The business unit had mostly wound down and it's not important enough to spend that kind of money on; it's just a bad look when people browse directly to that address. I registered the .net, and I'm hoping they'll quit renewing the .com some time and we'll be able to get it back for an ordinary price. It's quite obscure so no legitimate buyer will want it. I'm happy for them to keep wasting their money in the meantime.
Another time, I was starting a new company, and had an idea for a name that had personal significance, but involved common-enough words that you would expect it to be taken already. It turned out HugeDomains was squatting it, and asking about $2500. In this case it was worth spending that money to buy it off them, so I did, and have been a happy owner of that domain ever since.
I'm not happy about supporting domain squatting, and I've wondered about how it could be prevented, and even considered starting some kind of "benevolent" squatting service to beat the extortionate practices that HugeDomains seems to be undertaking in cases where people just forget to renew, but maybe the way they do it is the only way to do that kind of thing economically, and that only a complete overhaul of the domain name market could open the way for better practices.
HugeDomains is a massive operation though, I think they are the largest drop catcher at this point and that's their business model. If they are selling for $2500/ea roughly, they need to sell around 1:300 to remain profitable.
A lot of people try to imagine what a better domain market looks like and a more fair way to distribute things. I don't think I've ever heard a proposal that looked better. Since we know there is economic value, people are going to invest heavily (look at crypto space) and not create any real value. I think we ended up at a local maxima because of the organic development of domain names and the internet. There might be a scenario where everyone acted in some communist good faith best effort system, but humans just aren't capable of really doing that.
I went to the seminar with friends and the whole time thinking this is just bullshit, but somehow Brett McFail had ignited my less tech-savvy friends greed impulse so they paid for it and I helped run it. This was about a dozen years ago.
Major waste of time and money except for Brett McFail who made $millions selling $3000 courses on a slick stage pitch teasing passive income dreams where the fine print should have read: *actual results WILL vary GREATLY in the opposite direction than my nice trending-upwards passive SEO spamblog and domain sales income charts ;P
Then a whole world of research could be done on the value of a particular domain and a the right squatter spam content.
I feel like there should be some process where you have to put a real website at the domain name in a certain time period or you lose it. And I mean a real website not those godaddy placeholders. It’s just another rent seeking scam like we get in real estate without something like that.
They'll appear empty unless you happen to be scanning high-number random ports, but I'm using them and they're providing value to me.
I don't see how that would work; there's so many issues with it. For one, domain prices would have to be radically increased to handle all of the additional labor costs stemming from these manual verifications of domain usage (as you're talking about making a subjective determination rather than a technical one a la "does this domain have nameservers and is it responding over HTTP[S]"). Or, as an alternative, you might need to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars up front to cover the costs of such a claim when initiating it, as currently happens with ICANN UDRP/URS.
Secondly, I own a domain that I've had for well over a decade but which is not currently serving a website because I grew tired of paying the hosting company's fees every year and let it expire. However, I am still using that domain for email. Should I lose that domain? Should I be required to spin up some fake content, but not too fake, just to "park" it correctly? What's the minimum level of BS content I'd have to put up there to not be susceptible to losing it?
And lastly, this just opens huge avenues of abuse in favor of the domain squatters, as it gives them another avenue by which to hijack existing valid registrations from people. E.g. here's some example abuse of an existing ICANN system (UDRP/URS for trademarks): https://domainnamewire.com/tag/reverse-domain-name-hijacking... Add another system to potentially take domains over, but with an even lower bar to use, and you'll see domain hijacking attempts explode in number.
Meanwhile the actual domain parkers will be fine, as they'll improve their website autogeneration scripts just enough (maybe using GPT-3 or similar) to generate plausible content that would meet the bar and doesn't look like a mere parked page.
At the end of the day: domain squatters create negative value for society. They shouldn’t be allowed to exist
How about https://www.seat61.com/
Yes, seat, train etc were taken. But he build a business out of it.
I can't imagine this being the case. There are plenty of TLDs to choose from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
1, It used to be that the only 'real' domain name was .com. Nowadays this artificial scarecity is over. If you want to launch a service as foo.io, that is fine.
2, You can sue to have a domain name confiscated if you own the trademark with the same name
2, "You can sue to have a domain name confiscated if you own the trademark with the same name"
Yes sure. What do you know about trademark law and English common law? A few hints: trademarks are granted for classes and a trademark in another class or another jurisdiction would buy you nothing. lets take sampleword.com
A trademark for sampleword for delivering consulting services would not prevent me from running a shoe shop under this domain. Or a trademark in the US would not prevent me from using in in another country. Country specific domains may offer some protection here but not for .com .net
If you ever see the copious ads for "free to play, no money" gambling sites during sports events or live broadcasts, and wonder how free-to-play gaming makes enough money for that to be worthwhile, note that the TLD they use for their free version will always be a non-.com TLD, but if you just replace that TLD with .com you'll be met with a full gambling site. One that would be illegal to advertise, and often operate, in the jurisdiction where you're seeing the free to play ads. It isn't accidental.
Immediately upon letting it lapse it's bought by someone who I believe lives in Russia. They took my website, rehosted an old version found on archive.org, and then put advertisements on the site. It was not rehosted well, half of the links were broken. I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to embed malware on there too.
I emailed the hosting company (DigitalFyre) with a DMCA request to get it taken down. Their support assured me they'd take it down but they never did.
After a year of it being up the domain expired and I bought it back just to prevent someone else from doing the same. I figured it wouldn't be profitable for them so I made the decision to wait them out early on.
I'm thinking the entire process is automated, where they'll buy up expired domains, rehost archived versions, and hope for either the previous owner to purchase it back or for ad revenue to make it worthwhile.
Absolute scum of the earth.
The weird thing is that neither website was in the same niche as to what it was "reviewing". For example, the resort website had a post about the "best tomato chopper". Some of the old content was kept though(taken from archive.org), probably to look more "legit" to Googlebot.
These laws, like DMCA and the CDA, really need to be modified to impose more legal liability on service providers over situations like this. I know that many people on HN frown upon this view, but the gaping holes in these laws are enabling digital terrorism, extortion/blackmail, stalking, harassment, and copyright violations with no recourse for the victims.
A company that big would be in trouble to ignore DCMA notices.
Could also try contacting upstream providers if worth the trouble.
Domain names are digital real estate. Sometime real estate is in the frozen tundra and not worth much. Sometimes it's in Vancouver or London or Hong Kong and worth a whole lot. Get you some.
I’m not sure that squatting makes sense anymore. Getting generic names like “pets” or “travel” isn’t important today as it once was.
As for someone snatching up your old domain of a nonsense word, that sounds like someone looking for a quick buck. There will always be people looking to do that.
I’d imagine somebody gets a big payout once in a while and that hope keeps squatters squatting. I know (from trying to sell a few domain names) that it doesn’t happen often.
An alternate approach is to hold on to old domain names that get some traffic and hyperlinks. Alternately there is ‘SEOmaining’ where you develop simple sites on the domains you hold. If you can make $1 a month with a site you can hold the domains forever and you can even sell links from those sites, link to your own ‘real’ sites, …
I made an offer on a domain once and the immediate response was 'I already have been offered more than this'. Obviously he thought this was some great negotiating technique?
As it happened, I didn't increase my offer and, a few months later, the domain dropped and I got it for the basic registration fee.
I have had a few good experiences though where the person holding the domain was professional and would accept a reasonable offer but, anecdotally, they are a minority.
Usually they set up analytics on the holding page, and only renew if it reaches a certain threshold of traffic.
About 2 years ago I bought a lot of crypto themed domains seeing some of the secondary sales…the way I saw it if artificial scarcity is what gave cryptocurrency it’s value, then I’d rather invest in domain names that have a real use - like gold digging, the real money being in selling shovels.
I recently listed a few for sale and almost immediately someone bought cryptocomicbook.com for $1,250 which I registered and renewed only once. However I almost feel like that purchase was part of a scam by the domain registrar to encourage me to register more domains through them.
The number of domains is infinite, so the only real way to make money I think is to be able to buy/sell 2N or 3N domains or generic single word domains, but you probably need a big bank roll to get started in something like that, otherwise you just luck out buy owning something like ethereum.com.
Legitimate domain name investors are typically investing in generic words, brandables, or exact search term match domains.
I used to get mad about domain investors having every name I wanted to use for a project, until someone analogized it to real estate investing. Everybody would open their store on Fifth Ave. in New York City if they could afford it. Unfortunately, storefronts there are very limited. This is basically what generic, one-word .com domains are (frequent sales of $1M+). Domain names are just digital real estate.
Something that might specifically help with squatters buying lapsed domains is making it significantly more expensive to purchase a domain for some period of time (say a year) after the domain expires if you aren't the original owner.
But now, people often want 30k-50k per Domain. If you have a few hundred it may make sense to wait until you find an idiot. But I doubt that it is a very profitable business for many. It may be a long tail business. Many losers, a few make a killing.
I remembered years ago there was an incident on Conan's talk show where he offhandedly made up a dumb domain name and the network was forced to buy it so it didn't get bad things put on it.
Well the show has since ended, and I got a handful of emails and comments from fans but nothing ever from the network itself. Still a fun experiment.
I'm not an expert at this but some years back some SEO gurus were teaching to buy domains with age and already existing backlinks. I don't know if there is any truth to it (and i hope it doesn't) but could be one of the reasons why someone brought it.
You could say I'm squatting on those .com's as most of them are just empty sites. It's not so much that I'm trying to profit from them, but I still feel I have to squat on them because this is how the game is played. I know if someone offered me money for them I would probably sell, and I have thought about listing them in the past for this reason.
I'm sure it's the minority of cases but I often wonder how many squatters are in a similar position to me. I've read a few stories about people buying .com's and it's very often cases like this where someone once had a great idea for a site but then never found the time or the money to execute on their idea so now they just keep hold of the domain for a better time.
There's a lot of people being critical of squatters here, but if you own a domain which could potentially be worth several thousand dollars are you realistically just going to let it go and allow someone else to squat it and profit from your loss? If you're explicitly buying a domain to squat it then I'm more understanding of the anger, but even then this is just the game unfortunately. You deciding not to squat a domain doesn't mean it won't be squatted, in all likelihood it just means someone else will squat it and likely profit from your kindness.
The solution here isn't to shame squatters but to remove the value domains have. Adding more top-level domains achieves this to some extent, but because .com's will probably always be considered the default domain by most internet users they will likely always demand big valuations. One potential solution I thought of in the past would be to crowd source domain resolution. Instead of a domain being something you buy, what if it was something we just agreed on? Although this idea probably works better in theory because in reality I'm sure those with resources will inevitably try to game the system or simply bribe users to get the domain they want.
That is what low cost domains do - encourage hoarding. If a person had a valid use, then a renewal of $100 - 200, would be acceptable. However, he would not want to pay for something unused - this is much like old cars you see behind houses, ready to scrap - few have up to date licences. I feel that ICAAN should increase renewals to ~~$200 - which is a reasonable annual cost for something of value in use, but too expensive for something parked and rusting away. This would up-end the domain squatting business model - a model abetted by the people that control the web. Each country can set their and adjust it to rein in squatters. Another way is to traffic monitor (with some smarts) to cancel unused domains after a few months measured unuse. This would need some oversight, with a reclaim period of ~~6 months for a valid reason
