Fed up of domain squatters?

unknowndomain · 28 Dec 2009 at 22:49

I am so fed up of these people who buy literally hundreds of domains, and I wanted to ask if anyone knew of any initiatives to stop this?

In another thread a person was talking about his domain re-vu.net, com and co.uk and when I was looking I accidentally typed revu.com and it went to one of those sites, so did all the other variations.

It seems totally unfair that people are holding these domains with no information of use on them which just clog up domain name choices and clutter the google searches.

Is there any way to end this do you think?

Spyhop · 28 Dec 2009 at 22:58

It's just a fact that that ship has sailed - they took the initiative and they're not really hurting anyone.

I read in a book yesterday that a high school kid was making $25,000 a month off of banner adverts 'cos he got in to the web game early and put up a simple website. Fair play.

unknowndomain · 28 Dec 2009 at 23:30

I am not saying that i want to make money simply that they are annoying because there are so many of them and you can't help but visit a few each week and it would be good if they purged the DNS of all of them.

Bes · 28 Dec 2009 at 23:35

What's the problem? I already own the .net anyway, and just grabbed the other two as they became free.

Like I said I use at least the .net for hosting photos, email accounts, etc. esp. as my OH's family live in Brazil, it allows us to share stuff using a short and easy domain name.

The site was just a holding page before that anyway.

I have a few ideas so may develop a site there one day, but until then I intend to just hold on to the domains and use them for personal projects/ files/ emails.

unknowndomain · 28 Dec 2009 at 23:36

Bes said:
What's the problem? I already own the .net anyway, and just grabbed the other two as they became free.

Like I said I use at least the .net for hosting photos, email accounts, etc. esp. as my OH's family live in Brazil, it allows us to share stuff using a short and easy domain name.

The site was just a holding page before that anyway.

I have a few ideas so may develop a site there one day, but until then I intend to just hold on to the domains and use them for personal projects/ files/ emails.

I am not commenting on what you did/are doing I am refering to the sites which stick a page of ads up and that is it, and use it for nothing more than that. They are all over the place.

Bes · 28 Dec 2009 at 23:39

unknowndomain said:
I am not commenting on what you did/are doing I am refering to the sites which stick a page of ads up and that is it, and use it for nothing more than that. They are all over the place.

Well you singled out my domains, so.....

PS the holding page has been put there by the co. I bought the domain off, as I have been moving house/ packing to fly out to Brazil in the morning so have not had a chance to put anything meaningful there... How do you know the domain is not being used for something behind that initial page that one would simply wish to hide from the majority of the public? The domain is still being used in that case....

unknowndomain · 28 Dec 2009 at 23:40

Bes said:
Well you singled out my domains, so.....

PS the holding page has been put there by the co. I bought the domain off, as I have been moving house/ packing to fly out to Brazil in the morning so have not had a chance to put anything meaningful there... How do you know the domain is not being used for something behind that initial page that one would simply wish to hide from the majority of the public? The domain is still being used in that case....

No I didn't I was saying that I made the mistake of typing your domain without the hyphen (mis-spelt it) and ended up on one of those holding pages, and that I was annoyed that often when you mis-type it ends up as one of those pages, I haven't even loaded your page, sorry for the confusion, I am not commenting on your's beyond the fact that I brought this up after reading your thread and making the mistake.

Bes · 28 Dec 2009 at 23:42

Ah I see, fair enough. Sorry for the confusion.

unknowndomain · 28 Dec 2009 at 23:42

Bes said:
Ah I see, fair enough. Sorry for the confusion.

Sokay

RandomTom · 29 Dec 2009 at 13:54

Domain squatters do indeed suck. But you have to take into account that even though the website might appear dead, be an advertising directory or be just plain useless, people use them purely for email.

I was looking at getting myname.com, it was blank, I emailed the guy and he said he'd never sell as all his business email goes through it.

Sucks though indeed, plus it means we get an infinite amount of dumb sounding companies/services that have tried to be creative to stand out

daz · 29 Dec 2009 at 14:24

The problems are two fold really:-

People attach greater trust and preference to certain domain extensions

Google attaches bonus points to certain domain extensions

Whilst I usually roll my eyes when people use Google like their browser address bar, e.g. typing in 'hotmail.com' straight in to Google - in some ways this is really good because it means you can't end up at some cameroonian site if you accidentally type in hotmail.cm into the browser address bar or some place in Oman by typing in hotmail.om. Google will return the result of what it thinks you want, so in that sense it's good and better than people using their address bar.

The increasing prevalence of people using Google as their address bar will hopefully mean that typo squatters won't be able to earn their renewal fees for the domain.

Furthermore, if online advertising ever does suffer a big drop - people with large portfolios of domains (e.g. 1000+ of which there are a lot these days) may be forced to reconsider their position in the market. Google, if ever short of cash for whatever reason or under shareholder pressure could decide to take a larger chunk of AdWords/AdSense revenue, which could impact a lot of businesses, but primarily the likes of domainers who throw up either a parking page or the good ones will throw up auto-generated entire sites based on a few keywords. These sites might only make £10 a year each, but if the renewal is £6 a year and you do it on a large enough scale, you can make a lot of money in a very automated fashion. A small change in online advertising revenues would severely impact people following that business model.

BloodyL · 29 Dec 2009 at 16:50

I do believe you have just given a solid reason why Google should be making more money for themselves!.
Heh.

unknowndomain · 30 Dec 2009 at 00:01

More money to google!

daz · 30 Dec 2009 at 01:08

People would still buy to speculate, but the boom in domaining has been helped by Google paying so well for ads. Take that away and people would have to really evaluate their portfolios.