By Saul Hansell
Here then is an updated field guide to some of the activities of “domainers,” as they call themselves, with references, mainly from Wikipedia.
Cybersquatting: Buying domain names that include names of existing companies or brands in hopes of reselling them to the companies that use those names.
Typosquatting: Buying domain names that are misspellings of the names of frequently visited sites, hoping to profit by showing ads to people who visit the site by accident.
Domain name speculation: Buying generic domain names in hopes of selling them to some company that wants to use them.
Search arbitrage: Attracting traffic to your Web pages by buying advertising on search engines, in hopes of profiting by displaying ads, often sold by Yahoo or Google.
Made for AdSense sites: Sites with little or no original content that are designed to rank highly for certain terms in search engines, generating profit from text ads such as those sold by Google’s AdSense service.
Domain parking: Buying domain names that describe common things people may be looking for, hoping to profit from ads related to that topic.
Direct navigation: This is not properly a business in itself. Rather it refers to the behavior of some (probably ill-informed) users who type what is in effect a search query directly into the address box of their browsers. Those in the domain parking business often profit by buying domains that are common terms typed into browsers.
It is this domain parking business that Marchex and others are trying to build upon by adding content and features to accompany the ads on their pages.
These practices vary on a number of dimensions. Cybersquatting can be illegal, for example.
But I’d suggest that there is at least one question that should be asked about all of them: Would users want to go to these pages if they understood in advance what was on them?
If the answer is no – and in many cases I suspect it is – how sustainable a business is this sort of domaining?
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