Domain drop catching is still a problem this days?
(Edit: I was going to elaborate, but pressed the post button trying to quote something. Maybe Karma cause I was laughing at Monster muting himself all the time in the Q&A. I'm interested in how the Epik Fail data could be used to dropcatch domains. And also in the fact that InTrust Domains was a dropcatch company and it's dev team was developing dropcatch tools before being aquired by Epik.
The big problem with the Epik data breach is that people may be unfamilar with the terminology or the methodology of the domain name business. The numbers of the large-scale Domain Tasting era (where domain names would be registered for the five days Add Grace Period, tested for their pay per click advertising revenue and deleted if they weren't making money without the registrar having to pay for them) are in the free to read pages on Amazon (Chapter 2 - Money for Nothing) of the Domnomics book in my signature. Over a billion (1,000,000,000) domain names were registered and deleted in .COM over a few years. InTrust Domains (if it was Domain Names International Inc) was not one of the main registrars during that time. The combined gTLD figures for the registrar for some of the peak Domain Tasting months are quite low.
Month - Total Domains - New - Deleted - Deleted Grace
|200704 | 2556 | 70 | 21 | 2 |
| 200705 | 2454 | 48 | 17 | 1 |
| 200706 | 2436 | 58 | 10 | 2 |
| 200707 | 2363 | 44 | 10 | 2 |
| 200708 | 2299 | 44 | 22 | 5 |
| 200709 | 2286 | 38 | 8 | 1 |
| 200710 | 2224 | 52 | 19 | 1 |
| 200711 | 2163 | 31 | 16 | 0 |
| 200712 | 2083 | 18 | 10 | 20 |
Compared with one of the main players, Belgium Domains LLC in the same period:
Month - Total Domains - New - Deleted - Deleted Grace
| 200704 | 603695 | 37025 | 1690 | 11183568 |
| 200705 | 552273 | 30346 | 589 | 1693704 |
| 200706 | 579352 | 35344 | 558 | 11845015 |
| 200707 | 608907 | 33067 | 1266 | 1344979 |
| 200708 | 631581 | 31285 | 1489 | 14956845 |
| 200709 | 633637 | 39904 | 2924 | 1002185 |
| 200710 | 655115 | 51136 | 2977 | 779980 |
| 200711 | 632726 | 6528 | 12289 | 4754135 |
| 200712 | 578462 | 0 | 7233 | 0 |
A drop catch is a domain name that has been deleted and reregistered just after being deleted. There were networks of registrars specifically created to target deleting domain names. If the domain name hadn't a waiting customer or could not be sold within the five day AGP window, it was dropped again. Not all of the deleted grace domain names were dropcatch domain names but a lot were. The .ORG was, at one stage, having each day's entire set of deleted domain names being taken by dropcatcher registrars. There are around 2,500 ICANN accredited registrars. Of these, only 600 or so are retail registrars. Most of the rest are dropcatch registrars.
The simple explanation for dropcatching is that it starts with the WHOIS record. There were quite a few of those in the Epik dataset. A WHOIS record will have the creation date for the domain name, its expiry date and its last modified date. When you have that data, you know when a domain name is up for renewal and likely to drop if not renewed. The first step is as simple as extracting the domain name, the creation date and the expiry date from the record and putting it in a database table. That creates a kind of watch list.
Then there is a kind of qualification of the domain name. Not all domain names are equal so the potentially high value ones are short domain names, one word domain names or domain names that contain potentially valuable phrases. There's another type where someone owns a similar version of the domain name. If a domain name has a working website and with a lot of links to it, it becomes more valuable because a website on the domain name after it is reregistered will still get traffic. That traffic could be monetised.
Dropcatching software is relatively simple but can be computationally intensive at the upper scale. In 2011, Google changed its algorithms. Unfortunately for Google, it labours under the premise that they are the smartest guys in the room. While its new algorithm took out a lot of the low hanging fruit, it did not really affect the drop catching business. It still continues to this day.
There is dropcatching software available that can run on a desktop or laptop. The main constraint is the number of people trying to catch the deleting domain name. This is where the dropcatcher with the largest number of registrars has the advantage. These registrars can send hundreds of requests to the registry for the domain name as it deletes. Some individual domainers get lucky with dropcatching but a lot of the good domain names go to auction on sales sites run by the industrialised dropcatchers. Epik is not a major player in this part of the market as its focus is primarily retail registrations.
Regards...jmcc