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By Luc Lezon, Technology Columnist  It’s hard to be anywhere near the domain game and not come across the term “domain tasting.” The concept behind it is pretty simple: you register a domain and park it for a few days to see if it makes money. If the domain performs to your expectations, you keep it, and if not, you delete it, usually receiving a full or partial refund.
Although tasting is a fairly new phenomenon, it started back in the .COM boom days of 2001 with IARegistry.com and DotRegistrar.
Before going further, it’s important to understand the difference between a registry and a registrar, especially since the two sound almost identical and we’ll be using them quite a bit. A registry is an organization that manages all domains and DNS records at the root level for a specific extension (e.g. Verisign is the registry for .COM/.NET, Public Interest Registry for .ORG). A registrar is an organization that provides domain registration services to the general public (e.g. Network Solutions or eNom). A registrar must be accredited by a registry to sell a specific TLD (top level domain) or a ccTLD (country code top level domain) registration.
Going back to our history lesson, the .COM/.NET registry (Verisign) allowed a five-day grace period for new domain registrations. This meant that registrars could send a “delete” command to the registry within the first five days of a domain being registered by their customer (the registrant). The initial thinking behind that was to allow registrants the ability to delete a domain and receive a full refund in case they misspelled it during registration. Some clever thinkers figured that with all the .COM companies going bust there must be quite a few good domains dropping, but picking them from the list of the 30,000 that drop daily is no easy task. So they convinced a few registrars to use the five-day deletion period to sample dropping domains in bulk. Soon enough, Verisign caught on and prohibited the registrars from engaging in this activity.
In 2004 Verisign changed the frequency at which the root zone file was updated. This allowed new domain registrations to resolve to sites almost immediately, instead of the previous 12 to 24-hour wait. A new breed of registrars that perfected their skills at the drop game was ready to jump on this, and they did. Domain registrations skyrocketed from an average of 30,000 per day before bulk tasting started to 100,000 to 500,000 to close to two million per day today.
This time around Verisign sat back and watched the show, after all, the retention rate for tasted domains was higher than ever before (due to more Pay Per Click (PPC) companies being able to monetize the traffic more efficiently) and that resulted in more cash in the registry’s pocket.
Soon enough registrars with exotic names started popping up left and right with daily registrations exceeding that of GoDaddy and other established registrars. Many of these registrars were formed for the sole purpose of tasting. While this was against both Verisign and ICANN policy, the two organizations looked the other way due to the amount of cash that tasting was brining in.
While high-volume tasters registered one domain after the other, the average domainer felt a bit of a smack. Virtually all domains that dropped as part of the regular drop cycle (approximately 20,000 to 30,000 .COM/.NET) were now picked up almost immediately by one of dozens of tasting companies. This meant that in order to secure a dropping domain, an average user had to rely on one of the drop catching companies such as SnapNames or Pool, where bids started at $60 instead of the usual $7 for a hand registration. Things got a lot more expensive for the non-domainers. Business owners that forgot to renew their domains were now stuck paying as much as the tasters wanted to get their domains back. As is often the case in the domain business, things once again changed for those in the domain game.
These days there are three basic types of volume tasters: drop tasters, data mining tasters, and brute force tasters, and of course there is no reason why a company can’t be all three. Drop tasters, as the name implies, taste the daily dropping domains by registering virtually everything that expires and becomes available. Data mining tasters rely on various data sources to generate their domains lists. These sources include Internet Service Provider (ISP) Domain Name Server (DNS) error logs (from users typing in an address incorrectly into their browser and the ISP’s DNS server catching that request), typo databases, various combinations and permutations of popular sites and much more. Finally, brute force tasters, the least creative of the three, rely on dictionary files and a big bank account. They generally go through a dictionary file registering two to four word combinations of every word, so appleapplepear.com may be something they would try.
As you may have guessed, tasting is a numbers game and it tends to be fully automated. The average taster retains 1 to 2 percent of their total registrations. The ratio is heavily dependent on the data source, so it may be significantly higher for data mining tasters with good data, and much lower for the brute force tasters. Brute force tasters tend to burn through the most cash while data mining tasters tend to register the more risky typos and trademarks. Most tasted domains make just a few dollars over their registration fee per year, so once again, the law of large numbers comes into play.
While there is still room for others to join in on the fun, the game does require a certain level of creativity and a big wallet. Being a numbers game, volume tasting will almost always require the taster to own a registrar since paying even $.01 per deletion is not cost effective. Having a registrar however does not guarantee success in tasting, as it’s also necessary to have a reliable data source to feed the registration scripts and register domains. A powerful backend application and servers are also necessary to handle the traffic, monetization, performance tracking and accounting.
While volume tasting might only be an option for players with deep pockets, it’s still possible for the average domainer to make some decent coin in the tasting game. Instead of tasting tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of domains per day, a few clever domainers started to taste domains with a different purpose in mind, resale. Now, instead of looking at the PPC figures to determine whether a domain should be kept, these tasters register just a few available and generic two to four word domains in an attempt to flip them on Sedo or one of the other domain auction sites within the five-day deletion period. While many of these domains won’t fetch headline prices, they may sell for up to $500 a piece and that’s enough to keep the average domainer afloat, assuming he or she can clear a few sales per month.
The future of tasting is uncertain. Eventually the volume tasters will run out of data sources and the pool of available domains worth tasting will disappear. Rumors suggest that that Verisign may eventually institute some type of a deletion fee, similar to the one recently adopted by the Public Interest Registry that manages .ORG registrations.
Whatever the future brings, tasting will continue to resemble the Wild West in terms of rules, quick and easy riches, and the breed of people it attracts.
Luc Lezon of Lezon Inc. is a guest technology columnist for Modern Domainer. Send him your domain-related technical questions and column suggestions to
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