DomainTools Blog

Our Estimate: Verisign Manages Over 100 Million .COM Domains

2012-01-26T17:26:46Z

A number of organizations track the .com domain registrations without taking into consideration the complete picture, thus underestimating the current count. Our research shows that the .com count is already well past that number.

Verisign publishes a daily “zone file” of registered .com domain names with their associated nameservers. Yesterday the zone file listed 99,837548 .com domain names and that number has been growing by an average of about 22,000 net new .com domain names per day so far in 2012. But there are two general categories of domain names that exist but are not listed in the zone files.

The first category is well known, at least to people who work in and around the domain industry: domains in the Redemption or Pending Delete periods. Each day tens of thousands of .com domain names hit their renewal date. There are currently 2.1 million .com domain names in either Redemption or Pending Delete status.

The second category is much less well known, a category DomainTools refers to as ‘dark domains’. Domain names that exist, but are not pointed to nameservers, are not listed in the zone file and therefore not counted by most sites that track domain registration data. An example of such a domain is Spectrum.com; it exists but has no nameservers, and does not resolve to a website. Another example is theexpertcare.com; the Whois record indicates a fraud alert on the domain name and a ‘suspended’ status. This domain is also not in the zone file and yet is certainly not available for anyone to register.

Only Verisign knows for sure how big the list of dark domains is, but we have conducted ongoing proprietary research that reveals over 400,000 known dark .com domain names, as found in blank-nameserver.com. This count is included in the recently updated domain statistics data on our DailyChanges.com website. Our calculation of .com domains includes those listed in the zone file plus the dark domains. With that information in mind, we calculated the current total of .com domains managed by Verisign to be over 100.2 million.

100 million actively registered domains is an enormous achievement for the dominant TLD worldwide, and congratulations are in order for Verisign and the registrars which support .com.

As we all know, .com is the biggest top-level domain by a long, long way. For comparison, the next biggest gTLD today is .net with a relatively small 14 million domains. In country codes, Germany’s .de leads with almost 15 million. The closest competitor to .com among the gTLDs introduced by ICANN since the year 2000 is .info, with about eight million domains.

There’s no doubt at all that .com is the domain of choice for most of the world, but it’s taken it a long time to get to 100 million. From its creation in early 1985, it took the registry two and a half years to reach just 100 active names. It was not until 1997, in the middle of the rightly-named dot-com boom, that the one millionth concurrently active .com domain name was registered. In addition, there have been over 300 million other unique .com domain names registered and deleted since the inception of the TLD.

Our records show that the biggest growth period for active .com names came between 2005 and 2007, the height of the domain tasting craze. During this time, many domain investors used a loophole in registration rules to sample type-in traffic for free. Investors kept the domains they found that were most likely to profit from pay-per-click parking. In 2006 the .com zone grew by over 14 million names, driven by this speculation. In both 2005 and 2007, it grew by over 12 million names.

Since then, a change to ICANN’s rules means the tasting market has dropped to virtually nothing, but the .com zone continues to grow faster than it did pre-tasting, showing an increased demand for domain names as more new Internet users come online globally. In 2011, DomainTools counted almost 8 million net new active .com names added to the DNS. The number was about the same in 2010.

The big question in 2012 is: what will new gTLDs – such as .web, .music, .green, .shop, .paris, .gay and all the others, not to mention “dot-brand” domains – mean for .com? Many people believe that .com’s position is unassailable, that .com will always be king.

Will new gTLDs mean that .com will grow more slowly in future? Will companies use their new branded gTLD domains instead of buying up thousands of defensive .com registrations? Or is it more likely that for every registration in a new gTLD a company makes, it still feels the need to register a matching .com domain? Nobody knows the answers to these questions yet, but it’s going to be fun finding out!

What do you think?

A Visual Gallery: Which Sites Protested SOPA & PIPA on January 18th?

2012-01-24T17:15:15Z

As most are aware, today, Wednesday, January 18th, thousands of websites went dark to protest SOPA & PIPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and (Protect IP Act) similar to sites like Wired.com , as seen in the image.

DomainTools provisioned its historic thumbnailing service on a new site called Screenshots.com, as announced in December. Today, we customized that service to capture the homepages of websites that are protesting SOPA & PIPA so you can see how their content and message has changed in light of the protest.

To memorialize this historic event in Internet history, we also created a specific page to feature and archive a sampling of many of the sites as they existed today.

If you would like to learn more, here are a few good sources regarding the acts and protest:

SOPAstrike.com and AmericanCensorship.org
Matt Cutts, Google’s software engineer that heads the Web Spam Team, covers SOPA well on his blog. If you check out the blog, you’ll find links to Google’s statement and a link to sign the petition.

It should be noted that a number of companies in the domain space have joined the fight, including our friends at Tucows and NameCheap.

If you visit Screenshots.com, you can queue other sites for screen capture by using the link on the right side of the search results page. If we do not yet have any screenshots for your site, by searching for the site on Screenshots.com you have automatically queued it for capture.

Who Won the FREE Reverse Whois Report Contest?

2012-01-03T22:26:59Z

The time has come to draw a name out of our Reverse Whois contest entries via SantasFavoriteWhois.com . And the winner is…Paul Goldstone! His entry read, “Dear Santa, please send me a free reverse lookup report. There’s a cookie in it for you!” Congratulations, Paul!

Honorable mentions go to the following contestants who submitted some great entries:

****#1 (Bob)****

Dear Santa.

I would really appreciate it if you’d give me a Reverse Whois Report (from those nice people at Domains Tools) for Christmas. It would be a big help in maintaining my domain portfolio. You can send it to me over the internet, so you wouldn’t have to make a stop at my house. I’m sure you get enough milk and cookies everywhere else and could use one less stop.

I’ve been very good this year. As I’m sure you know, I’ve been fair and honest in my business dealings and kind to people and dogs.

Thank you for your consideration, Santa.

Your Friend -

Bob

P.S. – I’d prefer a 3 or 4 character dot com, but I know it’s too much to ask for. Maybe having the Reverse Whois Report will help me get one.

P.P.S. – Please be careful of airplanes when you’re flying around.

P.P.P.S. – Please give my best wishes for a Merry Christmas to Mrs. Clause, the reindeer and all the elves.

****#2 (Neil)****

i’ve been good at getting bad guys. LET ME WIN!

A Screenshot a Day

2011-12-20T19:41:01Z

It’s been over a week since we launched Screenshots.com on December 6th. We’re excited to have this live for all of you to use. To those who have sent us feedback on the site, thank you!

Please feel free to continue sharing your thoughts with us regarding the site functionality or anything else that comes to mind. You can share feedback by commenting on this blog or send us an email via Support(at)Screenshots(dot)com. You can also feel free to post messages via Twitter or comment on our Screenshots.com Facebook page wall.

With that said, we’ve started posting a screenshot a day on our Screenshots Facebook page.

Every day, we post a newly updated screenshot from our archive. It’s a great way to gain insight into websites that you may not be aware of (or ones that you have been aware of but haven’t visited recently!).

Be sure to friend us on Facebook to receive these daily Screenshot updates in your Facebook news feed!

Insight Behind our Screenshots.com Launch

2011-12-06T20:27:10Z

Today marks the launch of Screenshots.com , a new DomainTools site that provides an excellent showcase for the millions of historical website thumbnails we’ve collected over the years.

It’s also typical of the kinds of engineering problems that seem relatively straightforward until you try them on web-scale.

Most of us know that browsing the web with Internet Explorer version 7 can be difficult. If you browse carefully you may be able to avoid the problem sites, but sooner or later you’re bound to trip up. Intentionally trying to visit every webpage on the ‘net would be downright silly.

And yet, that’s precisely what we’ve been doing for years to generate the website thumbnails you see on our Whois product. It’s also how we’ve built a database of more than 254,819,641 website screenshots (and counting!).

It’s a messy business aided somewhat by virtualization technologies and a carefully-engineered home built queueing architecture. Yet, it still presents significant engineering challenges and non-obvious business questions.

How do you teach computers to know whether a website has changed “significantly” since you last looked at it so you don’t store a bunch of duplicate images? (Hint: read about perceptual hashes and Hamming codes).

How do you decide how tall of an image to capture? For that matter, how do you capture part of the browser that’s outside the screen?

If you want your screenshot to capture what most people would see when they visit the site, which web browser and operating system do you use?

Most sites are not as OCD about cross-browser support as we are. At one time, IE7 was the best browser to target since it had the broadest support, which is why we selected it as the ‘default thumbnail browser.’ Now, after reviewing our stats, we’re thinking it’s time for an upgrade, maybe even to Firefox or Chrome.

That’s one of many things we’re changing in our thumbnail system–the system which already made Screenshots.com much more than just a bunch of images. Our engineers conceived a nifty tool that discovers interesting domain names mentioned in news feeds and highlights their screenshot on the site’s landing page. They also took several of their latest ideas and experimented with them on the Screenshots.com search tool. It’s still a work in progress, but you can already use it to reveal interesting insights about a domain (try searching for “hertz” to see what their home page looks like in different TLDs).

We’re also moving quickly to expand our infrastructure, improve our capture rate, and add new servers to support the features we’re planning to add. We already had 20 virtual servers capturing screenshots; soon that number will increase to 40, with more supporting servers coming online shortly thereafter.

Now the fun part begins – we get to hear what you think of it, what your ideas are, and what novel usage patterns you come up with. Send us your feedback to support@screenshots.com or comment here.

Win a FREE Reverse Whois Report from Santa!

2011-12-02T16:08:36Z

It’s that fun time of year to start another give away!

We’ve been working with Santa to provide a FREE Reverse Whois Report to one lucky DomainTools fan…

Find out all the details by visiting Santa’s Favorite Whois site.

P.S. You have until January 1st, 2012 to enter the give away by contacting Santa@SantasFavoriteWhois.com about your wish to win the report.

Good Luck and Happy Holidays from DomainTools!

Politics and Disposable Domain Names

2011-11-28T18:44:05Z

With the news not too long ago that Republican Jack Abramoff is fighting to get control of jackabramoff.com from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, I thought I’d take a look at the always tricky subject of domain names used in politics.

Abramoff is just the latest in a long line of people in political circles to have risked embarrassment by not registering their names in .com. Registering the name of a political opponent – or somebody you simply disagree with – to criticize them online is a common tactic during election cycles.

To name just one example, when former eBay CEO Meg Whitman ran for governor of California in 2010, she found she had to fight for megwhitmanforgovernor.com and a handful of other relevant domains, which had been registered by somebody else, using the UDRP. And she lost!

Because the UDRP is especially unpredictable when it comes to personal names, if you’re running for office the only way to defend yourself from these kind of attacks is to register as many variations of your name as possible. Even if you win, the UDRP process can run for many weeks, more than enough time for embarrassing headlines and a loss of political capital.

Elections come and go, and some – but definitely not all – political domains are what I call “disposable” domains.

Here in Washington state, voters recently approved Initiative 1183 to privatize liquor sales, following a campaign that was hosted at yeson1183.com . That domain has a limited opportunity for re-use. But the unsuccessful campaign for the “no” vote was hosted at protectourcommunities.com – a fantastic domain that could be used for any number of future political campaigns.

Just because a campaign is over, it does not mean that you should let your domain expire. While johnsmith2011.com may be disposable, johnsmithforgovernor.com may not. There’s always the next election cycle to think about! The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, discovered this the hard way this year when he was forced to file a UDRP for the expired domain backboris.com , which he’d used to get elected in 2008 and plans to use again in 2012.

Politicians may not think about inbound links and SEO when they’re campaigning for office, but lots of domain investors do. Even a domain that may appear temporary and “disposable” will have attracted lots of links during a campaign; if it’s allowed to expire it will be snapped up for the traffic. If it’s subsequently registered by somebody who uses it to drive traffic to controversial services – such as gambling or pornography – that could harm the politician’s image. Once a domain has expired, it could be used for anything, even re-registered by a political rival.

Politics is a dog-eat-dog world, the Internet is increasingly being used to reach out to voters and far too many politicians don’t think carefully enough about their domain names.

DomainTools Baby Shower

2011-11-11T18:51:54Z

Yes, you read the headline right. We had a baby shower celebration this Thursday at DomainTools in honor of Jason and his wife Erika – welcoming their baby girl in just a few weeks! We ate some ice cream cake and played a baby-themed game that was an interesting mix of trivia, pictionary and charades! Gustavo impressed us all with his charade skills – check out the footage link, which directs to our YouTube page. Hilarious.

We wish Jason and Erika the best as they embark on this exciting new adventure!

Jason and Erika

Preparing the Ice Cream Cakes

Starting the Baby Game!

We even caught video of Gustavo playing out part of the game – charades-style. Check out the video here, it’s a good excuse to check out our YouTube channel if you haven’t subscribed to the feed yet!

Presents time...

One of the gifts...a onesie with the DomainTools logo on it!

Happy Halloween from DomainTools!

2011-11-01T18:36:24Z

In case you haven’t heard about our Halloween pumpkin carving contest last week, we wanted to share some fun photos of the event. We had a great time teaming up to compete for bragging rights (the 2 BEST DomainTools Halloween pumpkins of 2011)—topped off with Halloween cake and a birthday toast to Brian, our office manager!

Pumpkin carving contest in Action!

DomainTools Window Display on 5th Avenue

The Halloween Birthday cake. Happy Birthday, Brian!

You can see all of the party photos on our DomainTools Facebook page and find out which two pumpkins won bragging rights – click here

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Happy Halloween!!

How Many Active Visitors are on Your Site Right Now?

2011-11-01T18:36:48Z

We found out the answer to that question the other day, having gained access to Google Analytics Real-Time. It was amazing to see the number of site visitors flicker from moment to moment. Ah, the moment we have been waiting for finally came true- here’s the evidence!

Yesterday, here was a snapshot of how many people were on DomainTools.com when we first accessed the Right Now beta, around noon Pacific Time:

And today, around 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time, encroaching on 3k again…

So far, we are thrilled to be able to see a live pulse of our website anytime we like. Next up: we’ll look into the real-time reports. If you’d like to know immediate impact to site traffic, access real-time reports, we’d recommend looking into Google Analytics Real Time. Right now it’s still in early beta but you can sign up for early access to the beta here.