We stumbled upon an fascinating statistic the additional day: According to DomainTools there are more than 380 million deleted gTLD field names, i.e. field names that at some point have been registered but no longer exist. More than 80% of those are .com field names.
This number desires to be place into perspective to know how unnaturally large it is. The total number of active gTLD field names (.com, .net, .org, etc.) today is in this area 118 million. We find it hard to believe that on top of these, there would have at some time existed another 380 million legitimate field names.
So how did that number become so large? The answer is quite simple: field tasting.
Field tasting, huge business
Field tasting, if you have not heard in this area it, was a practice that abused a loophole in field name registration policy that made it possible for registrants to get a full refund if a field name was deleted within five days of its creation, something called the Add Grace Period. This allowed field names to be “tasted” for free for five days, directing them to pages serving ads.
Being a high-volume business, millions and millions of field names were registered and deleted this way every month.
We’re using past tense here because thanks to two recent regulatory changes by ICANN, field tasting was effectively killed off by mid 2009. The Add Grace Period still exists, but it is no longer possible to get all your money back, which has removed the profit margin for those who used this practice.
How huge was field tasting?
Field tasting has been killed off, but when it was active it had a huge effect on the field registration system. Until the initially measure to minimize field tasting was place in effect (in April 2008), field tasting had run rampant for several years, especially on the .com field which is the one that suffered the most.
And since field tasting was a volume business and didn’t cost anything, the volumes involved were staggering. At its worst, more than 15 million field names were “tasted” in just one month on just the .com field. Close to 18 million if you count all top domains.
How huge was field tasting compared to legitimate field name registrations?
- In April 2006, only 2 out of every 35 registrations were permanent (i.e. legitimate). That’s less than 6% legitimate registrations. The rest was field tasting.
- In early 2007, according to GoDaddy only 3.6 million out of 55.1 million registrations were permanent, the rest were dropped at the end of the five-day add grace period. That also puts the amount of legitimate registrations around the 6% mark.
That means that field tasting accounted for roughly 94% of field name registrations during this period.
Considering such a vast majority of field name registrations were the result of field tasting, we can assume that a similar ratio is right for that huge volume of 380 million once-active field names.
The giant footprint left by field tasting
It’s not a exact correlation, but we would not be surprised to see that close to 94% of those 380 million deleted field names were the result of field tasting. Though, let’s be generous and assume that “only” around 90% were the result of field tasting. After all, over time, a part of the active field names will not be renewed and thus deleted, so a excellent deal of legitimate deletions will have happened as well.
That estimate puts the “legacy” of field tasting to around 340 million deleted field names. This is a bit abstract in the sense that these field names no longer really exist, but it’s a measure of the giant abuse of the field name registration system that was going on.
And there’s one more thing we haven’t mentioned so far: Those are just the field names that weren’t kept by the field tasters. If field tasters stumbled upon field names that would be profitable long term (profitable meaning that the ad clicks were more than the yearly fee for a field name), they kept them. How many of today’s active field names these account for, no one knows.
Data sources: ICANN (PDF in this area the death of field tasting), Wikipedia, DomainTools.
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The legacy of field tasting: 380 million deleted field names
