How to make easy money by buying and dropping domains
Associated Press published an interesting article last Saturday, ‘Entrepreneurs Profit From Free Web Names‘. This article tells the story of the modern ‘internet-maffia’, a couple of companies that grind the web for domain names that are about to expire and automatically register them, without human interaction. The technique behind this is fairly easy, every programmer can create an application to do so as long as he’s got the right resources (read, servers to run the application on).
So, how does this work? In the USA you’ve got a five-day grace period in order to decide whether you want to keep the domain name or not, this was added to prevent people from accidentally registering domain names with a ‘typo’ in it, a typing mistake. But, as AP writes, it turns out that it’s easy (and lucrative) to use this in another way. With this five day period these ‘domain name tasters’ have got a short period of time to decide whether they expect to be able to make money with the domain they registered, if they don’t expect it, they’ll simply ‘drop’ the domain-name before the period is over. In the other case it’s a fairly easy task to fill the domain with advertisements combined with some (automatically generated) content, in order to mislead search engines or if the domain is really worth the effort, a ‘real’ website.
But experts AP has interviewed also expect other, more dangerous and bothering issues to come up soon. With this five day period spammers, scammers and people working in the ‘grey zone’ can easily switch domains a lot, making it harder to find them, or simply keep dropping and rebuying the domain name every five days, in order to stay under the (still low) $6 price for modern general domains.
It’s a lucrative but difficult business, I don’t think the ‘regular’ people will have much of a chance to register a decent domain name in the near future. Anyhow, there are still some websites that will you also view recently expired domainnames, giving you the chance of finding a nice one or perhaps even making some affiliate money through your interest. The least annoying one I’ve found so far is ‘Just Dropped‘, it’s limited to about 10 searches a day unless you subscribe though and it doesn’t support country-TLD’s, but it can still turn out to be useful if you’re out of inspiration.
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