Thread

So I am searching for a new domain this morning, and of the 71 domains I looked up (many quite obscure) 46 of them were squatted on.

When I look up the registrar of some I found that many of these owners were associated with 50+ other domains. When we can register domains for $5 and these people can make $20/yr off of ads revenue per domain it becomes a profitable business.

I think we should raise the cost to register a domain to $100+/yr

That way it is no longer profitable to hold “Portfolios” of 200 domains and frees up the pool of domain names again for people to use legitimately.

When you think about it $100/year is $10/month which is nothing really, however it is greater than the ad revenue of 99.999999999999999999999999996 of the domain squatter’s sites.

Thoughts?

I think it’s a terrible idea and would cause the vast majority of domain owners to drop the domains altogether.

I understand the frustration of squatters, believe me, but jacking up the price 10 times hurts consumers MUCH more than it helps anything.

How many .tv domains are out there? hardly any. because it’s 50 bucks a year. That’s half and the extension is almost unused.

FYI squatters often times pay as little as 2 dollars per domain.

EDIT: Let me clarify here too. I don’t mean to make it sound like a dumb idea. It’s certainly not dumb at all, I just see it from a different perspective.

I have a little over 60 domains myself. None are squatted. Currently (at 62) it costs me $527 per year. At 100 dollars it’s $6200

I own more than I can honestly remember. I have to tick them off in my head.

None are squatted (ok, one kinda sort of. heh!). I’d have to let them all go at that price.

Besides, a lot of these squatters register them, measure the traffic, then either keep them or get a refund if traffic is too low. This wouldn’t stop these people.

Even for my two primary domains I’d have to consider it at this price.

Also, this kind of would force people to blog sites instead of rolling their own. Owning a website is more democratic than it once was, but it’s still only associated with the privileged. It takes education and some small amount of money to have a site. I’d actually like to see these factors go down.

I guess where my issue is, and I am partly guilty, is when a domain gets purchased (with good or not) intentions it takes it out of the pool for others to use.

Its kinda like the kid at recess who goes and grabs all the balls he wants, only uses one, but might want the others later.

For the 13 or so domains I actually use I would not have an issue with paying good money for them, I would not be so quick to register a domain for fear of others grabbing it.

And with ICANN ruling out domain tasting they can no longer get refunds if there is no traffic, so now they have them for a whole year.

JT, Of the 62 domains you have, how many have actual content on them?

I currently have two domains, of which I’ll be letting one lapse rather than renew. Neither is really likely to be desirable to anyone else. Neither were any of the others I’ve had, used, and let lapse. All of those are now either throwing “can’t find server” errors, or leading to those cookie-cutter “this domain is for sale” pages and have been since I stopped using them.

The one domain I’ve stuck with is the first one I ever got, McGeheeZone.com. I had to settle for it because McGehee.com was already taken. If you go to that domain you’ll find yet another of what has been a long series of “under construction”-type pages there, as has been the case almost the entire time it’s been “taken.”

I corresponded once with the owner of that domain, and I gather that he is putting it to use (or at least, was at the time), just not for a website. Still, it’s a little annoying that I’ve done so much while the guy who has the domain I really wanted doesn’t seem to have done anything.

But that’s life on the intartubez. No one’s entitled to anything just because they want it, or know they could put it to better use. McGeheeZone.com could be a bigger brand than it is, but it’s already a bigger brand than McGehee.com is. That’s enough for me.

I looked for 60bpm.com about 10 years ago. Taken. I checked a year ago, still no content, so I email the person, asked if he was going to do anything with it. Just check, he did something much cooler than I would have.

I have a flash animation of a heart I wanted to put up and be the entire site. This would have been HUGE in 1998 I tell you.

Oh well, guess I have to live in internet obscurity now.

And just because there are no web services running, doesn’t mean the domain isn’t being used. I have a domain I use only for email and ftping files. That’s it.

There should be an easy way to trade domain names though.

And just because there are no web services running, doesn’t mean the domain isn’t being used. I have a domain I use only for email and ftping files. That’s it.

Fair enough, I have one for email as well and it seems to cut down on spam; however most sites without a web server running for the most part are not.

If you take a look at the sitepoint market place you can see that many people are selling “Portfolios” of “Aged domains”, they have registered them, kept them for 3 years and now they are hoping to get large amounts of $ for them based on the fact that they are older therefor should get better PageRank.

Age of a domain I am sure has little value in PageRank (though there is some…) its kind of like having a bottle of wine from many years ago without the wine. Sure the bottle is old however the content is non existent and therefor pretty much valueless.

So here is my thing with the raising of the dollar value. For whatever reason people are hoarding domains, whether they think it will increase in value ala 1999, they think it will get enough traffic that their ad revenue will outweigh their very low entry costs or they just plain want it so no one else can have it…. It sucks and its lame.

So if we increase the cost to register a domain to $100 it no longer becomes a low risk investment to keep “Portfolios” of domains and JT is right, many will dump their domains.

Awesome! Seriously think about this for a moment, think of how many useful but unused or poorly used domain names would become available. I don’t think $100 is too high of a cost either, that’s $8.33/month I’m sure many of us spend that on Coffee alone every morning.

What it does is it forces people to have a compelling reason to acquire a domain name.

Is $100 a valuable investment for my company? Yes
Is $100 a valuable investment for my client?  Yes, especially since there are more domains to choose from, relevancy increases.
Is $100 a valuable investment for http://canwehaveexpressionengine2yet.com? Probably not
Is $100 a valuable investment each for buying 5 different variations of what my next app is going to be called? No.

I’m not trying to exclude anyone from owning a domain and I do think that we need to encourage growth in content on the web. Which is why I want to make owning “Portfolios” of domains no longer profitable.

It is getting to the point where squatted/unused domains outweigh legitimate content on the web…. and no one wins then.

/rant

Is $100 a valuable investment for http://canwehaveexpressionengine2yet.com? Probably not

But this is valid speech, made a point, and probably brought $9 dollars of happiness to the universe. I know I smiled.

I prefer to see barriers to speech lowered, not raised.

And one of your points, seems to work against you. At $100 you wouldn’t register the variations on your brand (some big companies might, but most people wouldn’t). Defensive registrations are mostly possible because they are so cheap. I’d rather some jackass not have registered meatfilter.com. I do wish is was a redirect to metafilter.com, since I tye it that way a bit too often. And I am guessing that guy makes his $100 a year.

And at $100 sites like daringfireball would be forced to choose betwwen .net or .com.

I do understand your complaint, I just don’t see this as a way to address it. I honestly don’t think it can be solved unless you have a board of people that decide website “value,” and if it’s a waste of the URL throw it back in the pool. But am guessing in cases like this the sites would just bounce from scammer to scammer. And I would hate this idea even more, since I really think once a person has shelled out their cash they should be able to do anything legal with the site.

Put up puppies for sale or ads.

I own, and I am guessing I’ll miss some, these sites:

thisflapfirst.com (my first blog run on an iMac G3 in my basement using pMachine)
christopher.jorgensen.name (my current blog)
asking4stuff.com (the original idea for my letters site was to write polite letters asking for free things and see what I was sent).
jackasslettters.com (the name says it all).
puppypotpie.com (the site I wanted in reserve incase MTV ever tells me to stop calling my site jackassletters)
somedarkplace.com (a planned DYI art blog).
fervorflower.com (a site that holds some of my bad poetry and digital chapbooks, slightly NSFW)

And three others I won’t mention. I think this is most of them. That would be $1,0000 a year. That’s a bit more than a morning coffee. I’d rather not give any of them up. I don’t have the time to dedicate to these that I would like, but I also think it would be a bit awkward to roll all these under one URL.

All have had content at some point.

Some of these are under a EE MSM install, the rest are static.

And I am just a hobbyist. If I were doing this professionally I’d have a few more I would expect.

And I didn’t know ICANN was doing away with domain tasting. That’s pretty cool.

Brand protection is huge, even for the smallest of sites. When I start a site, I don’t just buy the .com, I buy the .net and the .org as well.

I also buy variations of my site’s domain in .com, .net and .org. All told, I normally buy about 15 domains for every site that I start to protect my brand.

I feel that this is a legitimate practice, but there’s no way in hell I could afford to pay $1,500 a year in domain renewals for each site ($15,000 in total). There’s just no way.

It just doesn’t work. I come from a (former, but still) high-price domain country, Austria, with its .at Domain. Before the market opened up somewhat, the NIC AT monopoly would charge people just about the 100$ you mention (currency exchange rates vary, but it’s a fair estimate) to register, and half of that for yearly renewals. As a result, people would flock to .com etc Domains, or .de (Germnany), which has been much cheaper from the beginning, or some domain forwarding service like. .at.tf. It’s become a bit better in recent years, but I still cannot justify another .at domain on a lark, so I’m increasingly using .info for private projects. This serves nobody, really.

I remember (some time back now) that in the UK they were made to stop charging exorbitant prices for domain names and were legally only allowed to charge an administration fee which is why domain fees are pretty good over here nowadays. I remember once having to pay something like £300 for a domain though!!

Now you can get a domain name for as little as 9p!!!

Best wishes,

Mark

It is getting to the point where squatted/unused domains outweigh legitimate content on the web…. and no one wins then.

That’s an odd way of looking at it. I don’t see how unused domains have any effect at all on content, except on their own domains. The only way a domain with no content has any impact on finding content is if a person types domains into the address bar without already knowing what’s there. I’m pretty sure most people search for content by more efficient means than that.

I can’t help but continue to think this is really about wanting a domain that someone else owns and isn’t using to your satisfaction.

I, on the other hand, don’t care to waste my energy disapproving of what other people choose to do with what’s theirs.

I guess where my issue is, and I am partly guilty, is when a domain gets purchased (with good or not) intentions it takes it out of the pool for others to use.

Its kinda like the kid at recess who goes and grabs all the balls he wants, only uses one, but might want the others later.

For the 13 or so domains I actually use I would not have an issue with paying good money for them, I would not be so quick to register a domain for fear of others grabbing it.

And with ICANN ruling out domain tasting they can no longer get refunds if there is no traffic, so now they have them for a whole year.

JT, Of the 62 domains you have, how many have actual content on them?

There are 3 that I registered just to protect my nickname and name, but other than that all of them.

But I do things thoroughly some times. For instance, I own and operate www.e-referrer.com but just to make sure I 1. don’t get copycats repeating my steps I purchased the following domains and use them as aliases:
e-referer.com
e-referrer.com
ereferer.com
ereferrer.com
ereferrer.mobi

So i’d need to pay $600 per year for my domain registration? no way.

There are other things changing and the whole naming conventions are changing with ip-v6 too. I don’t know how but I’d imagine they change a lot of things that would open numerous more options when that finally happens.

You don’t have to charge a lot of money to keep a domain.  All you would need to do is charge money to delete the domain within the grace period.  The squatters are registering and deleting domains on a massive scale.  Most other people don’t delete domains right away and even a small fee would put a serious damper on their business.

The biggest problem comes from a relatively small number of people.  Kill their business model and a big chunk of the problem goes away.

I kind of look at domain registering as homesteading.  You can’t get land these days for almost nothing.  The better the land, the higher the price.  Eventually all the good land gets taken and you have to pay someone to buy what you want.  Some segments are totally taken up.  Of course two and three letter LLL (letter, letter, letter) .com domains and I believe even all the 4 letter .coms are taken as well.

ICANN’s exactly doing that, very soon. They are no longer going to wave the transaction fee on such cancellations, even though it’s only a quarter or so.