I recently had the opportunity to renew 1000 of my spam domains.

Since the domains only cost me 99 cents each when I bought them and renewal was nearly $6 at the time, I decided it wasn't worth it.

In fact, my evil plan was that I was going to simply let these sites expire and then buy them back once they expired and went into the domain pool...

Imagine my surprise, then, when RegisterFly started snatching up the domains:

Domain ID:D10433389-LRMS
Domain Name:THEOFFICIALSCOOP1.INFO
Created On:17-Jun-2005 19:01:42 UTC
Last Updated On:18-Jun-2006 15:17:44 UTC
Expiration Date:17-Jun-2007 19:01:42 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:eNom, Inc. (R126-LRMS)
Status:OK
Registrant ID:C635403-LRMS
Registrant Name:Domain Registration
Registrant Organization:Registerfly.com
Registrant Street1:623 Eagle Rock Avenue

Now, the interesting thing to note is that they didn't snatch all of the domains I let drop, but they did do the ones that were getting traffic.

To make it even more interesting, RegisterFly put up a domain parking page.

So, pick whatever registrar you like so much and here's what they're most likely doing...

1. Register domains in quantity for folks.
2. Wait for those domains to expire.
3. When they expire, the domain registrar has a certain period of time (45 days?) to keep the domain in case the person who owned it wants to renew.  In that time frame, they've got plenty of time to test a domain parking page and see if it generates revenue, and...
4. If it does generate 99 cents or more revenue in that 45 days, they've got a winner on their hands and will register it themselves.

I don't know about you, but that looks like a cash cow business model to me when you can get customers to register domains and build traffic to them FOR you!

The only thing I haven't been able to work out yet is how they're tracking the amount of money they make on the clicks by domain.

I'm not sure what the search engines do (if anything) to combat this.

G-Man

Edit: renew domains not subodmains :P