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Go Daddy: 6% chance somebody else wants that available reg-fee domain too

Kevin Murphy, August 10, 2012, 07:51:42 (UTC), Domain Registrars

If you’ve found an available, unregistered domain name, there’s at least a 6% chance that somebody else has also found it that very same day, according to Go Daddy.
More than 6% customer searches for available domain names are performed by more than one person each day, head of product development Richard Merdinger said in a blog post.
According to Merdinger, due to the sheer volume of searches, “more than six percent of customer searches for available domain names are performed by more than one person each day.”
The post, which was written in response to a single highly questionable allegation of “front-running”, added:

This overlap in domain name requests happens every day. As unique as customers believe their domain name ideas are, there’s more “innovation collision” than many people realize. With so many domain name registrations happening every day, there is a good probability a domain name you searched for is also being searched by someone else.

He also publishes some anonymized log data to prove his point.
There are tens of millions of domain searches on Go Daddy every day, apparently.

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Comments (5)

  1. Troy says:
    August 10, 2012 at 9:14 am

    I can’t imagine that math being right.

    Reply
  2. Michael says:
    August 10, 2012 at 2:09 pm

    I wonder how much of that 6% is from business partners, friends, and/or family saying to eachother “Hey, what do you think of superspiffydomain.com for that thingamagig we were talking about?”

    Reply
  3. Michael says:
    August 10, 2012 at 2:14 pm

    I smell something fishy regardless. Sorry, no sale.

    Reply
  4. Rubens Kuhl says:
    August 10, 2012 at 5:14 pm

    May be those 6% are exactly those domains that are front-runned… more than one search for a domain, let’s register it.

    Reply
  5. J. says:
    August 10, 2012 at 6:14 pm

    lets do the stat here: provided hand registering of a domain takes 5 minutes which I’ll use as a time pattern for this example only. Practically I could register 12*24= 288 domains on one single 24hr day.
    Lets say it’s begining of October which means 280 day of the year have already passed, which means, if i wanted to, I could have hand registered 288*280 = 80k domains by this day..
    280 days equals 403200 minutes divided by 5 = 80640 which means I could have hand registered the very same domain over and over again over at least 80k times during that same year . So one single 5 minute period represents 1/80640*100%=0.001%. That’s the chance for my to pick a certain 5 minutes period of out over 80k in order to hand register my domain. Sorry it too little to be true. Now let’s go back to what GoDaddy says: “more than 6% chance somebody else wants the same domain on this same day but NOT on the same minute! A day is 24 hours long, which equals 24*60=1440 minutes divided by the 5 minutes needed to hand register a domain equals 288 times one could have hand registered the same domain over and over again which means (0.06/288)*100%=0.02% for me and somebody else trying to hand register the same domain simultaneously. 0.02% – sorry but I’m not convinced

    Reply

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