Study Finds a Third of .Com Domains Completely Unused

Home / News

Study Finds a Third of .Com Domains Completely Unused

By CircleID Reporter
February 01, 2019, 4:19 pm PST Views: 9,688 Comments: 1

How Many .com Domain Names Are Unused? Singapore Data Company recently conducted a study to answer this question. Christopher Forno, company’s CTO writes: “When looking for .com names, I’ve been frustrated by how many are already taken but appear to be unused. It can feel like people are registering every pronounceable combination of letters in every major language, and even the unpronounceable short ones. Is there rampant domain speculation, or do I just think of the same names as everyone else? Let’s look at the data… I started by crawling a random sample of the domains from the top-level .com DNS zone file, until reaching 100,000 valid domains. ... The crawl took a little over 48 hours from a single server located in a Singapore data center. ... Then, I wrote a script to help me categorize websites based on their screenshot and body.”

By CircleID Reporter

CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.

Visit Page

Filed Under

Domain Names

Comments

But there are uses for domain names Chip Marshall – Feb 1, 2019 4:52 PM

But there are uses for domain names other than hosting websites.

# 1 Reply | Link | Report Problems

The Weekly Wrap

More and more professionals are choosing to publish critical posts on CircleID from all corners of the Internet industry. If you find it hard to keep up daily, consider subscribing to our weekly digest. We will provide you a convenient summary report once a week sent directly to your inbox. It's a quick and easy read.

I make a point of reading CircleID. There is no getting around the utility of knowing what thoughtful people are thinking and saying about our industry.

VINTON CERF
Co-designer of the TCP/IP Protocols & the Architecture of the Internet