Traffic aggregators raise expirations
By Charles Miller

Several months back, a good friend of mine in San Miguel showed me his résumé and I noted it included the address of the website for his former company. I asked about that and he told me with his being retired and the company shut down, the website no longer existed.

Just for grins, I turned to my computer and brought up his website. He gasped, and his jaw hit the floor because what we found was one of the more graphic porn sites we had ever seen.

What my friend learned was that expired domain names do not always die. A growing number of domain names are being allowed by their owners to expire, either intentionally or accidentally. If the expiring website had been the recipient of a significant number of hits, it is likely to attract the attention of some shady middlemen called “traffic aggregators.”

What traffic aggregators do is to seek out the expiring domain names that have been receiving a lot of traffic, snatch up the name when it comes available and redirect that traffic to other sites, primarily porn and gambling venues.

The mechanics behind this are quite simple, as both internet traffic and domain registrations are a matter of pubic record. For example, among the 300 million websites, Atención San Miguel ranks as the 2,008,778th most popular site on the entire internet, and the registration expires July 12, 2011 at 5:53pm. If someone at Atención does not renew the domain by that date, some traffic aggregator probably will.

Using automated robots, the traffic aggregators sift through the tens of thousands of domain names expiring every month looking for those with high traffic volumes. If the owner of the name fails to pay the annual fee of about US$8, the traffic aggregators can legally do so. Some traffic aggregators purchase up to 50 domain names a day.

My friend had no idea such a thing could happen to him and he is in good company. The Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, the United Nations, the US Department of Education and a long list of churches are among those who let their websites lapse and had them converted to porn sites.

Allegedly, there is a Russian porn site operator that has been specifically targeting Catholic websites and successfully (and legally) took over ownership of sites from the Brooklyn and the Cleveland Diocese.

Another Atención reader recently wrote to me describing how their domain name used only for email still got them in trouble because buried in the fine print of their agreement was something saying there could be advertising put on their complimentary web page. The advertising was anything but complimentary.

Some people who tried to get their domain name back have reported that the traffic aggregators are perfectly willing to sell the name back to the previous owner, but for a price in the thousands of dollars. Remember, they are in this for the money. There is absolutely nothing illegal about what the traffic aggregators are doing. They are simply buying up names the previous owners did not renew.

So the question for the owner of a disused domain name is what to do about all this. The simple answer is to not be a cheapskate. It is possible for around US$60 to renew a domain for ten years. A decade from now the traffic coming to that non-existent site will be miniscule and it will no longer be of interest to the traffic aggregators when it finally expires.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ7@SMAguru.com.