It’s becoming a truth universally acknowledged that when a gTLD sees a growth spike it’s because the registry is running a promo and tens of thousands of machine-generated junk domains have been registered.
That certainly seems to be true for June’s biggest growers.
The gTLDs the grew the fastest last month were .watch, .yachts, .autos, .irish, .boats and .qpon, each growing by between 50% and 73% and between 7,880 and 47,884 net domains compared to the end of May, according to zone file analysis.
But doom-scroll through lists of domains newly appearing in the zone in June (and presumably registered in the same month) and you’ll quickly see that the vast majority are utter crud.
XYZ’s .autos is a prime example. It’s currently retailing for under two bucks a name at the registrars I checked, and there were over 51,000 names in the July 1 zone that were not in the June 1 file.
Registrants took the opportunity to register hidden gems such as yqtsfg.autos, rgwydp.autos and l2xnnu7.autos… thousands of them. Not quite every new name but, eyeballing the list, very close to it.
I found that 37,428 of these 51,741 newly registered domains contain numerals. In .auto’s stablemate .yacht, 27,335 of its 33,620 new domains were partially numeric. These are not domains registered by investors.
The strings have clearly been algorithmically generated and bulk registered, but to what end?
It can be and is sometimes argued that there are legitimate reasons people might need to register tens of thousands of gibberish domains, but security researchers believe they’re primarily used for spam, phishing and other DNS abuse.
With ICANN being pressured to crack down on bulk regs, these kind of growth stories, along with the revenue they generate for the industry, might sooner or later become a thing of the past.
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