130 Million Deleted Domain Names
HosterStats.com has the domain history of over 130 Million domains deleted between December 2000 and April 2010. These domains are generally available to register. While some of these domains are domains that have been the subject of domain tasting, many are not. They were once somebody’s idea of how they were going to make a fortune on the internet. Most deleted domain websites concetrate on the immediately deleted domains – domains that have dropped in the last few days. Dropcatchers have even pulled back from their once common practice of registering the day’s entire drop in various TLDs.
This domain tasting practice allowed domain name registrars to register a domain, test it for approximately five days with PPC advertising and if the domain didn’t generate enough revenue, drop it without having to pay. This problem became so extreme that in 2007 and 2008, tens of millions of domains were being registered per month in .com .net and .org TLDs. The .org registry PIR.org was one of the first to take action against the practice of domain tasting. In the detailed .org statistics 2007 page on HosterStats.com, the effect of PIR’s action is visible in the massive drop in domain name deletions between May and July. Almost the entire .org domain name drops for each day were being registered by dropcatchers and some were auctioned off. Others were parked with PPC advertising. But most were deleted and the process repeated. PIR’s action limited the the practice of domain tasting in .org TLD but it was a few years before ICANN was goaded into taking action to limit the damage in .com and .net TLDs.
The .com deleted domain count is 97,420,360 domain names. The .net deleted domain name count is 13,440,421 domain names. The .org deleted domain name count is 8,236,397 domain names. The .biz deleted domain name count is 1,912,953 domain names. The .info deleted domain name count is 8,567,276 domain names. The .mobi deleted domain name count is 621,667 domain names. The .asia deleted domain name count is 68,426 domain names. The last two gTLDs are the most recently launched of the TLDs in this list. The .mobi sTLD has a more sustained domain registration volume than .asia sTLD and the numbers of new domains being registered through the .mobi Landrush Anniversary Junk Dump phase remained relatively steady. The .asia sTLD growth was not sustained after its Landrush period and it has fallen back to a pattern that is similar to the growth pattern of a small ccTLD.
In one sense, this is the drop list of all domain name drop lists. On its own, it is just a collection of domain names. Over the next few weeks, it should be possible to break down this list on the basis of keywords. There may well be some gold in those lists.