Today I invite you into the secret world of domain tasting…

What is domain tasting?

Domain tasting (also known as domain kiting) is the process of abusing the 5 day free trial period when registering a domain name. The domain tasters simply register thousands of domains per day, then monitor them for 5 days, and purchase the ones that get traffic.

People are generally split on the morale issues behind this technique. Some say it is fair, and is a clever technique… others say it is cheating, and immoral.

However, recently thinks have gotten a lot darker.

Let’s look at this example:

* A perfect domain name pops into your mind.
* A quick check at your favorite domain registrar reveals that the domain is still available.
* For some reason, you put off the actual registration for a few days.
* And when you come back to finally register the domain, it’s taken by someone else!

Most people presume this is coincidence, but it now appears that it is part of the domain taster’s artillery.

It is thought that the domain tasters are monitoring the searches you do at places like Godaddy.com (Godaddy deny this). Then, they simply register all the domains that are searched but not purchased.

In other words, they let you do the research, and then they take the domain from under your nose.

Recently DNforum reported these chocking stats:

August 12, 2007 was the largest Domain Tasting day ever Domain Tools reported. They recorded over 8 Million Transactions today. This is a new high. We have never seen 8 Million transactions on one day before. That would be either an add or delete. Over 99 percent of these transactions are completely free and use the 5 day grace period to test domain names for traffic before they are purchase for a long term buy. Sometimes organizations will taste a domain name for multiple 5 day windows. They can tie up a domain for a long time and test it longer. Domain Tasting seems to be getting worse, the number of transactions continues to grow. I can see a day when more domain names exist in the 5 day grace period then exist as real registrations.

and Bob Parsons from Godaddy has this to say on this issue:

“Just over 35 million names were registered for the month of May. Of those just over 2.7 million were permanent registrations. That means that 92.3% of all domain names registered were part of a scam now known as domain kiting. These names were kept off of the market, they were used to generate search engine revenue – AND BECAUSE OF A LOOPHOLE ICANN REFUSES TO ELIMINATE – those 32.3 million names were used without being paid for.”.

It certainly appears that the secret world of domain tasting is no longer much of a secret.

What are your thoughts on this?

Dean