Whenever I search for domain names, I am amazed by how many are being held for ransom by speculators.  Is there information anywhere about the number of domain names that are owned versus the number that are active sites?  I would define active as those having some content live that are updated at least once per year, excluding parked pages at domain registraton vendors showing only ad content.

Out of curiousity, I went to the Regex Dictionary to see if there were any words matching the patterns com$, us$, de$, at$ etc. that would give you a del.icio.us type domain name.  Amazingly, almost every domain matching these patterns, like Anxio.us, MorseCo.de, and Obnoxio.us were already registered.    I haven’t started looking for the variations like GreatMorsCo.de and WorldofMorseCo.de yet, but I’m sure there are some people buying that garbage up as well.  Thankfully, some of the sites like Obnoxio.us have real content, and some of the ones like Unico.de are functional sites matching the country the domain extension was intended for.  However, there were tons of unhosted domains, or ones like MorseCo.de, which clearly seems like a speculator site. 

I would love to see regulations that limited the number of unused domain names one could register.  Hopefully people will just stop buying from speculators.  Until then, I’ll be sitting pretty on  BuyingABunchOfDomainNamesAndHoldingThem
WithTheHopeThatSomeChumpWillPayYouBigBucksBlo.ws. (Thanks so much Western Samoa!)

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