What happened to the Internet in 11/07?

November 7, 2008 9:15 AM

A question about Internet domains and DNS: What happened to the number of registered domains between 10/07 and 11/07? For the first time they dropped, and significantly: 2 million domains were unregistered.

Zooknic shows this result.

Date Total domains
11/15/2007 94,854,717
10/15/2007 96,946,506
9/15/2007 95,233,625

This is the only month in history that there is negative growth since 1998. Was there a policy change? Something cleaned up? If you know of something, a specific reference to what you recall would be great to have. Thanks.

posted by about_time to computers & internet (8 answers total)

netcraft's surveys in november and october of 2007 don't show any decrease in number of websites or active websites.
posted by jepler at 9:59 AM on November 7, 2008

Maybe it has something to do with Google's AdSense actively dropping domain names that are repeatedly registered and dropped, which is also known as domain tasting. If random domains are no longer netting the gains they once were, they may no longer be re-registered - and I'm not sure if Domain Tasters are tallied in the total registered domains number.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:59 AM on November 7, 2008

Eh, nm - didn't catch that this was in reference to 2007, my post was referring to events that happened after this.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:01 AM on November 7, 2008

long term registrations expiring?
posted by blue_beetle at 10:09 AM on November 7, 2008

I don't have an answer for you (yet) but if you look at the individual TLDs there, you'll see it's only .info that declined. That might be a clue, but to what I don't know.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 1:00 PM on November 7, 2008

Chesty_a: I think you might be reading the chart incorrectly. It looks like only .biz did not decline.
posted by about_time at 2:20 PM on November 7, 2008

Yes, yes I am. Thank you.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 6:50 PM on November 11, 2008

In case anyone is interested: with the help of someone outside of MeFi, I learned that the best answer seems to be that Capitol Domains stopped domain tasting on that date.
posted by about_time at 6:48 PM on December 14, 2008