Domain tasting may sound like a funny term, but it’s no laughing matter. Sometimes called “domain kiting”, domain tasting is when someone registers a domain name for the express purpose of testing it out during the initial five-day grace period within which one may cancel a domain, to see whether it will receive enough traffic to pay for itself, usually with just the clickthrough advertising on the site itself. (In fact, often the only that is on the site is advertising links.)
The domains registered in a domain tasting scheme are usually domains which either are common misspellings for other high traffic domains, or domains which have recently expired. In either of these cases, the domain is likely to generate enough traffic to pay for the cost of the domain registration (usually less than $10.00 a year). However, if it doesn’t seem as if it’s going to cover the cost of registration within the 5 day grace period, then the registrant simply cancels the domain.
So, why is this a problem?
Well, to start with, domain tasting is done explicitly to capitalize on someone else’s traffic – the user who ends up at one of these domains is almost always either trying to get somewhere else and mistyped the name of the site, or is trying to get somewhere else and the site’s registration has lapsed (often without the site owner’s awareness).
In addition, we are not talking about just a couple of domains here – domain tasters are able to automate the registration and cancellation process and register thousands of domains at a time. By all reckoning millions of domains at any given time are tied up in domain tasting schemes.
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According to Bob Parsons, CEO of domain registrar GoDaddy, “during the month of April 2006, out of 35 million registrations, only a little more than 2 million were permanent or actually purchased. The vast majority of the rest were part of the domain kiting scheme.”
But beyond that, a huge number of the domains registered under domain tasting schemes are likely to be infringing on the trademarks of others, intentionally. For example, the retailing giant Bergdorf Goodman and its parent company Neiman Marcus had to sue registrat Dotster last year to vanquish tasted domains BergmanGoodman.com and NeimuMarcus.com.
And now you know why, when you mistype a site’s domain name, you end up at one of those infernal advertising link farm sites.
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Learn to type well. And the problem will be solved. Always blaming the other guy for being inefficient.
Society at large functions this way. No wonder, things don’t improve.
This infuriates me. So many times I’ve typed in a URL to find out if it’s available only to find these darn advertising sites. Often makes me thing that just my presence there would be enough to serve their purpose and decide to keep the domain for themselves.
I thought cybersquatting was banned? Any thoughts about that?