The Afternoon Squeeze: Domain tasting
If you tried to head over here and typed in PRpolp (imagine someone actually owned that domain and littered it with adwords), then you clicked on an ad to get over to the real PRpulp, you would have benefited from a practice called domain tasting.
Domain tasting takes advantage of a loophole in the registration process for domains (i.e. www.prpulp.com or www.microsoft.com) by allowing someone to purchase one for five days and give it a test drive before returning it to the registration holder for no fee. The policy was created to enable sloppy typers who misspell a domain name and accidentally buy it to return it for no fee.
What’s happening today, however, is that sites are sprouting up at the rate of 4 million per day and are tried out or tasted. They names are often one or two letters off from major companies’ such as www.vorizonringtone.com and are then littered with adwords that point back to the real site (such as www.verizon.com). When someone clicks on the link, the owner of the domain gets paid while the legitimate company gets billed for a click-through.
One could argue that the business is perfectly legit – it gets people to the site they were looking for in the first place. Others see it as a shady practice that creates instability on the Internet.
They’re always an opportunity in the muck though. VeriSign, the company that controls the .com and .net domain extensions just launched a new service:
[It's] called “digital brand and fraud protection” that in part helps corporations combat trademark infringement through practices like tasting. The service costs $100,000 to $400,000 a year.
Via BusinessWeek.
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