Domain Tasting

January 2nd, 2007

Technology Here’s a term I hadn’t heard of before: domain tasting. This refers to something we’re all familiar with: a close mispelling of a real domain name. The article talks about “verizonpicture.com”, “vorizonringtone.com” (I’m not linking to any of these sites) which lead to a splog or a site that has a bunch of links to and pay-per-click ads on it.

Where is this different from just a splog? Well, the folks who register these sites only do so for five days. There is a regulatory loophole that allows registering for this amount of time for free, and then you can abandon it. So what is the result? Supposedly 4 million domains are in this situation a day. That’s a lot of crap on the web.

Even over five days, I’m sure with a carefully chosen domain name you could get a lot of traffic. There are a lot of either stupid or just rushed, misspellers out there. And expand that to not just one domain name but a thousand and that’s a lot of free money from nothing but bad spelling mistakes.

Anyhow, it’s hard to imagine a real-world analogy to this, but maybe it’s like someone who buys a fancy suit at Macy’s, and goes to a ritzy party pretending to be a celebrity, and then returns the suit? Or you open up a fast-food Indian place called “Naan and Query” right next to a competior? Or the folks who put “AAAAA” in front of their businesses so they’re listed higher in the Yellow Pages?

At the very least, I suggest getting rid of that 5 day free rule. Raise the cost for the splogs to exist and they will scale back or find something else to milk for free cash.

More info: CircleID, BusinessWeek, Wikipedia.

[tags]Technology, Domain Tasting, Web 2.0[/tags]

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