Expiry

September 21, 2005 7:26 PM

What is going on at a site like this one? I see this kind of thing all the time. I can understand that some opportunist has registered an expired domain, and is willing to sell it, but how would these links make any money for him in the meantime?
posted by megatherium to technology (3 comments total)

People either type in the URL, or they follow links that used to point to the original site. They land on that page, and some of them click on the links. The person that runs the site normally has an affiliate program of some sort with various advertisers, and so gets a fee for any traffic he sends to them through those links. It works in the same way that %99.9 of advertising on the internet works.
posted by Rhomboid at 8:05 PM on September 21, 2005

Keep in mind that they only need one actual webhost, to which they can point all the domains they're squatting on. And squatters have a lot of domains -- thousands of them. They (generally) only make a tiny bit of money with each one, but it's enough. As with Google Adwords, some are worth more than others, and finding those is part of the game.
posted by dhartung at 10:10 PM on September 21, 2005

When I turned down an offer to buy a domain I have been sitting on for a long time (one of those Real Soon Now projects...) the person pitched hooking me up to one of those kinds of things. A smarter man would probably have gone ahead and done it - after all, I am paying renewal fees every year - but somehow it felt worst to have junk on the unused domain than having it not resolve.
posted by phearlez at 7:32 AM on September 22, 2005