Google and ICANN vs domain tasters
ICANN and Google are now joining hands to combat domain tasting. What is domain tasting?
Under current ICANN rules, anyone who registers a new domain name has a five-day grace period to back out and receive a total refund. The policy is in place to prevent hassles if people mistype domain names during signup or simply have buyer’s remorse at signing up for ilovespaminacan.com. But because a five-day registration is free, some users “taste” millions of domain names in order to see how well they perform as marketing vehicles. The sites that don’t perform are then deleted and the cash refunded.
It’s a practice that thrives on mistyped and expired domain names, and it’s no longer limited to small operations. ICANN’s own numbers show that in January 2007 alone, the top 10 domain tasters requested refunds on 45,450,897 domains.
Now that’s a lot of domains. I’ve been doing domain monetizations before and I know domain tasting is a huge business. If you can earn $12 a year from a domain which costs about $10 to register, then you get a $2 income (that’s in a year). Not much if you ask me but still it is a 20% ROI. That’s so much bigger than what your money can earn in a savings account.
So where’s the big money? Remember, the $2 income was only for 1 domain. Just imagine if you can “locate” 1000 domains that can earn you $2 a year. So that’s an easy $2000 a year. How about if you can find 100,000 domains that can earn you $2 a year. That’s $200,000 a year. Now there’s the big money.
With domain tasting, there is no cost for them to register thousands of domains at a time since they can always “return” the domain and get a refund during the grace period.
What google and ICANN will be doing is ICANN will charge an ICANN fee even for those domains that were “returned”. That move will make it unprofitable for domain tasters to make money. In addition, google won’t allow adsense on domains which are still in the five-day grace period.
[via arstechnica.com ]
Tags: domain monetization, domain registration, domain tasting, domaineer, domaineering, Google, icann
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