To be fair it could be as simple as scanning their user list for a single sign up from one of those domains and then plastering a logo on the front page saying they use their product.
just realized a "great" add-on business idea for you. let people search, register the domains yourself in the background. sell them. you'd go to hell, so that's something to consider though.
i wonder if amazon predicts their supply chain based on search results.
Yes please, that'd be amazing.
However, it would be good to have some kind of system to weed out unused domains for other uses. Otherwise I imagine we'd have lots of occupied but abandoned domain names.
The Domain Industry needs an enema. I would like to see all
those old free domains, that aren't trademarks, or being used
actively raffled off--and not to the highest bidder. Just
an old fashioned raffle to anyone who owns a website.
Gives me an idea! Why not go buy up a bunch of these types of names then tell them that they look similar to their login url. THEN when they come to try to buy it they find you own it and then charge them an arm and a leg for the domain?!
We’re thinking about this. What we don’t want are domain speculators buying domains cheap and then doing nothing with them. That’s all cost and hassle for us. We want to let you register domains that you’re serious about doing something with. We’re running a bunch of experiments to see if we can allow new registrations of domains people are serious about without opening the domain speculation floodgates.
It might be fun to F with godaddy.com and start pumping them randomly with domains. Mixing random words in the dictionary and trying combinations in sequence like a typical user would would be effective.
Set this up to happen on a daily basis through proxy servers for different ips, and you might create an interesting way to bleed them a little bit.
Record the domains entered, and see how many times you get them to nick you. It would make for a fun blog post.
Keep in mind, they have to pay ever time they register a domain.
I see a great public service business here ... become a consumer advocate and buy a huge number of domains for $9.95/year. Charge the trademark holders a few dollars above that per year and deprive these trolls of the huge fees (> $2,499 per year per domain for premium names) they were expecting (yes, I'd rather they made nothing too).
It should be pretty easy to automate the process. The down-side is that if you're Comcast (or one of the other common targets) you're probably going to have to live with a .sucks site. Try not to incite people into believing you suck so much!
Maybe we could set up an impromptu flea market for trading our low value unused domain names. I have a few that I keep renewing just because I think I might do something with them. Realistically though, I probably won't use them and hope they might spark creativity in others through this thread.
Isn't that just the same as all the spammy grabbed domains? Get a good domain name, put ads on it. I've heard some people make good money with such sites.
Putting up a landing page for a 'parked' domain name would be a great use of this. Rather than letting your registrar put up a page where they make money off of the clicks.
Maybe you can have people donate their junk domains that they bought out of whim. I'm sure every HN reader probably have a few dozen domains that they let expire every year.
Domain tasting used to be easy money for spammers. Simply "taste" a huge number of domains, such as misspellings of popular sites, and put typically ad-filled domain parked pages on them. Figure out which ones make money and which don't, register the ones that are profitable, let the others lapse, and move on.
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