Last year VeriSign quietly started offering its Internet Profile Service (IPS) to domain name registrars. The service provides traffic data on pending delete domain names. Since VeriSign runs the DNS for .net and .com, it has access to data that most other sources don’t have.

Now domain name registrars are beginning to make the same data available to their customers. One of the first is Dynadot, which offers IPS to bulk customers. (Bulk customers spend $500 or more a year with the registrar. If you open a new Dynadot account, you can prepay $500 to become a bulk customer and get access to the data immediately. Dynadot also offers to send the current daily report for free so you can see if it’s worth it before signing up. Just send an email to info@dynadot.com with your request.)

IPS’ data set is rich, including non-existent domain and existent-domain traffic data. For example, here’s some of the data on a few domains currently going through pending delete:



The first two numbers represent a scale of the amount of traffic the non-existent domains are receiving for the last six days, as well as over four weeks. It’s on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest.

IPS also includes traffic data from the three months before the domain expired, a traffic score, the number of incoming links, and about a half dozen other metrics.

When using IPS to find domains with traffic, you should look for consistent traffic from the three months of data, as well as high scores for non-existent domain queries for both the last 6 days and four weeks.

With IPS, you can actually register expired domains at retail prices after they expire that still have traffic, and target them without the no-longer free practice of domain tasting. Granted, without marrying the database to a pay-per-click database, you won’t be able to estimate parking revenue. The data will be more valuable when a company such as FreshDrop integrates it into drop analysis systems.

Most of the domains on the list will be domains from previous web sites, so traffic will likely fall over time. You should also be wary of trademarks and trademark typos when using the data.

Also keep in mind that there is no data on domains that are sold through exclusive deals with NameJet, Snapnames, TDNAM etc. because these are usually sold before the domains reach pending delete status.

DomainNameWire