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One Porn Napper Has Over 4,500 Domains
from the seems-a-bit-stupid dept
We've mentioned previously the practive of porn napping where a porn website buys up the (usually accidentally) expired domain name of some other website and redirects it to their own porn site. My first reaction was that this was a stupid business strategy, because it's unlikely that people who find such porn when they're looking for something else will stick around and become regular customers. However, the blackmail angle makes sense - in that they hope to sell the domains back to the original owner at a hefty markup. One researcher checked out a single porn site and determined that they had porn napped over 4,500 domains. Assuming even the low end of registrations, this has to cost the company around $50,000/year. However, by selling just a few of the domains they could certainly make back the money. Yes, this is incredibly underhanded - and in many ways seems like blackmail. The researcher who put together the info is hoping it will help to force changes in the way expired registrations are handled, and giving people a longer grace period to renew their domains.
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It didn't cost them a penny!
The estimate of $50,000 is correct only if you actually have to pay of the sites. The porn-nappers probably didn't pay a single penny out of pocket.
Porn-nappers found a loophole in VeriSign's registration policy that allows a buyer to return any domain within five days of purchase. So they could buy a site, set up a porn page and monitor click-throughs for 5 days. If it was obvious the site did or would pay for itself, it can be kept. Otherwise it is returned.
In August 2001, VeriSign released 160,000 unrenewed domain names for sale. More than 40,000 of them were bought up within the first 24 hours and at least 25,000 of those were returned within five days.
I've been following the situation since early November and documented a lot of it on our web site. http://oii.org
Art Wolinsky
Technology Director
Online Internet Institute
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