Proportion of all Domains reg'd by Domainers?

[netfleet]

Anyone know how many domains are owned by domainers/investors?

The latest Verisign report seems to indicate about 8% in Com & Net when it states:

"VeriSign estimates that the number of .com and .net domain names registered for traditional purposes represented 92 percent of the base."

If that is the case, doesn't it demonstrate that we really are entirely dependent on end-users and that 'buyouts' etc will often be doomed to failure in the long run?

I'd imagine the influence of domainers in other extensions would vary too:

Typical cc-TLD - very small influence
.tv, .info, .mobi, .asia - larger influence

OK here's another question while I'm rambling. Can you order extensions based on domainers influence.

eg

.gov
.edu
.ccTLD (typical eg co.uk, ,com.au, de etc)
.asia
.eu
.tv
.mobi
.info

 

[gpmgroup]

That's an interesting question its hard to determine. What we did was look at the numbers of pages indexed in Google. The premise being that Google will treat all pages equally and set "entry bar" i.e. if it's good enough to be in Google then it probably has some useful content and the site is probably there most of the time [at least when Google crawled it on several occasions]

http://www.chart.info/namespace/stats19.htm is a few months old but shows the relative size of the TLDs domainer" are likely to be interested in if it's any use.


I seriously doubt 92% represents the .com sites with non PPC content on them. If you look at Alexa's top 1,000,000 sites there is so much junk out there its mind blowing that people visit it often enough to even get listed in there.

I would guess the vast majority of .com sites are auto generated PPC pages. i.e. PPC pages derived by computer rather than manually by domainers i.e. domains obtained from tasting and kiting.

Domainer's are a double edged sword for TLDs - Good sales establish publicity and also pay the registry's bills, but a lot of webmasters and companies have a real problem with Domainers and want to spend the money on development of their idea's rather than paying a domainer who got there first. The problem is such that in a lot of cases they will choose a second choice name which isn't as good simply because it's available.



From what we've seen, increasingly there is little point in putting up PPC pages outside .com or the big ccTLDs and all but the best .net and .orgs.

If PPC is to to decline combined with increasing annual domain charges I would guess there will be a significant falls in the total registration numbers especially for .com and .net [millions].

 

[RJ]

"VeriSign estimates that the number of .com and .net domain names registered for traditional purposes represented 92 percent of the base."

I wonder how they came up with that? Unless they're counting "traditional purposes" as including domain parking, that figure sounds awfully high.

At TRAFFIC Down Under last month the number being tossed around by promoters was that the TRAFFIC attendees alone owned approximately 10% of all domain names.

As a wild unsubstantiated stab at it, I would guess about a third of all domains are held by companies or individuals you would classify as "domainers". But I'm sure there are better stats out there.

 

[-REECE-]

We just might see a whole bunch more domainers soon: http://www.markmonitor.com/mmblog/?p=48 :hehe:

No clue on the number. If I were to guess, I'd see it somewhere around RJ -- 20 to 30%.

 

[Green Moon]

Based on the times I have looked for names for a project and found the .com, .net AND .org all either parked or clearly being used only to generate PPC with some type of automated content, I would be very surprised if the number is not higher than 30%.

It should be a fairly easy job for someone familiar with statistics to come up with a statistically significant sample size of random names in the whois database. Based on the small sampling size of polls in the US presidential election, if am guessing that the number of random sites needed in the test would be surprisingly small. If it was 2,000, one person could probably click on the sites in a couple of hours without any automation.

In other words, if VeriSign doesn't know the information, it is probably because they choose not to.

 

[gpmgroup]

Whoisireland (jmcc) has quite a few stats.

http://blog.whoisireland.com/2008/01/29/only-1337-eu-websites-activeunique-eu-is-a-disaster-zone/
Here he looked at .eu which had 13.37% active at the beginning of 2008