domain kiting exposed
Kevin Murphy has this awesome expose quantifying the domain kiting phenomenon first publicly sounded by GoDaddy’s Bob Parsons.
http://texturbation.com/blog/2006/07/31/domain-kiting-hall-of-shame/
Can it really be true that the Miami company he named controls, without paying for, some 16 million domains? We all want to see the market continue to appreciate, but this artificial scarcity created by certain registrars is not a healthy subsitute for actual demand from end users.
Correction 8/5 - due to the fact that controlled domains must be deleted then grabbed again within 5 days it would seem my number too high by a factor of six. I stand by the basic point, but an accurate number is probably closer to 2 million domains. Thanks Kevin for pointing it out (see comments for details)
August 4th, 2006 at 7:58 pm
Thanks for the compliment and the trackback Mike.
I should point out that 16 million is the number of domains deleted in a month. It doesn’t mean that that firm (or its customers) controls 16 million domains.
Remember that you can only get a refund within five days of registering.
If you were to assume that all those domains were kited, and that the companies were registering and refunding the same batch of domains over and over, then you’d have to divide it by six (five days multiplied by six equals one month) to arrive at the number of domains under control at any given moment.
I think my math is right on that. It may not be.
August 5th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
CORRECTION! OK thanks for pointing that errant calculation. Indeed if the majority of these 16 million deletions were domains they like to use, but never intend to register, it would indicate over 2 million domains (I’m rounding down from 2.67 assuming some half-million or so were dissapointments and not tried again) Still even if there are other problems leading to artificially high numbers here, just the mere fact that they are able to control a couple million domains without registering them is just wrong - the conclusion that your piece logically leads to.
As an end user my choices are limited not by the legitimate users on the web getting there first, but by non-purchasing folks like these. And as a domainer I want to profit from purchases, but I don’t want the market distorted by the artificial scarcity this creates. And worst of all, I’m actually forced to side with Bob Parsons on this one!