Peter’s Blog

I have decided to cover domain tasting as my first post. It is a subject I feel very strongly about and would like to tell you why.

So what is domain tasting. Domain tasting is the practice of registering domain names and parking them, if they do not achieve $x amount of revenue within the first 5 days the domain is dropped and returned to the registry. For domain tasters to make a profit they have to make roughly $0.10 in the first five days on the domain name (going on a domain price of $6.95 per domain). If the domain does not make this money then the domain tasterswill drop the domain name and return it to the registry. The domain tasters either have an agreement with the registrar to ensure that they do not incur any fees or they use a registrar that will allow you to drop a domain without any questions (a registrar is not charged for a domain that has been dropped within the first 5 days).

THE PROS AND CONS

The pros of domain tasting are few and far between for the industry as a whole but for the registrant it ensures that they only keep domains that have a proven record (i.e. they make more or the same in a year on average than it costs to register the domain). It makes perfect business sense for the registrant to do this asat the end of the year they have a good chance of managing a profit. A pro for domainers (even non tasting domainers) is that it helps increase the value of domains (as less decent domains are left in the registry)

Now for the cons. Many domains are taken up that have no value to the registrant at all for 5 days stopping any other user from registering them. Also the practice must put strain on the infrastructure. In February according to Bob Parsons (Go Daddy CE) 55.1 million domain names were registered BUT only 3.6 million were not dropped, so a total of 93.5% of domain registered in February were dropped from the system. Granted not all of these wee the result of domain tasting but I would certainly hazard a guess that 99% of them were.

The effect of this on the standard user (the non domaining user) is that they have x amount more droll and needless advertising to troll through before they find their content. Domain tasters house most of their domains on parking pages. For parking pages to become profitable you need visitors visiting these pages and clicking on the adverts. If a domain does not get type in traffic then the only way to generate visitors is to try and become high in the search engines. Many genuine decent content sites are now not only competing against genuine competitors but they are now competing against parking pages. If a user searching for that product, service or information can not find this information because of only finding tat results in search engines the user will end up disillusioned with the internet which impacts us all. If this happens then new ways of finding information on the internet will need to be sought that filters out non interest sites.

HOW CAN DOMAIN TASTING BE COMBATED

The best way domain tasting can be combated is for organisation such as I.C.A.N.N. forcing registrars to impose a compulsory fee for every dropped domain. This would help in 2 ways:-

1. It could potentially lower the required money needed by genuine registrations so could curb any increase in registration prices.
2. It would increase the funds needed by domain tasters to carry out the practice. Although 55.1 million domains were not dropped by 1 company it was most likely a core set of people that dropped the bulk. If a $0.25 fee was imposed it would have cost the practitioners a total of $12,875,000 for that month alone.

If you have an opinion on domain tasting I.C.A.N.N. are giving you a chance to voice it. DO NOT WASTE IT.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Domaining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.