Analysis of the internet domain names re-registration market

Abstract

Abstract Domain names registries play a central role on the Internet by enabling users to interact with services and people, as the world becomes more connected and more complex. Registries list, identify and localize Internet resources and cross-reference them with their owners. They help individuals, companies and organizations to keep track of more information and people, not just from within an organization but, increasingly, among organizations over the Internet. Since the most relevant and profitable domain names are becoming rare and investors are starting to see the value in the accumulation of a Domain Name Portfolio, several markets have started gaining momentum as a means for investors to make a profit from their Domains. The secondary market is the place to shop in today’s domain world, the place where many large corporations and end-users are finding the domains they need to supplement their current on-line business presence. Due to this increasing relevance, this paper will analyze one of the two types of domain names transactions on the secondary market—re-acquisition of dropped domain names. The analysis will be based on data that was collected over a period of 2 years from the registrant name servers databases, namely, the number of dropped domains, the number of re-registered dropped domains and the total number of re-registrations during a certain period of time. Besides the analysis of general trends, re-registered domains are also analyzed in terms of the characters they contain and their Google and Alexa ranks, creating a knowledge base that can help us understand which are the main factors that influence the re-registration of a certain domain name.