-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I was just struck by a couple of statistics: [snip] In January 2007, according to PIR five registrars deleted 1,773,910 domain names during the grace period and retained 10,862. That same month, VeriSign reported that among top ten registrars, 95% of all deleted .COM and .Net domain names were the result of domain tasting. [snip] http://www.informationweek.com/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=20150 0223 Having said that, Jay Westerdal mentioned on Sunday that: [snip] Today was the largest Domain Tasting day ever. We recorded over 8 Million Transactions today. This is a new high. We have never seen 8 Million transactions on one day before. That would be either an add or delete. Over 99 percent of these transactions are completely free and use the 5 day grace period to test domain names for traffic before they are purchase for a long term buy. [snip] http://blog.domaintools.com/2007/08/biggest-domain-tasting-day-ever/ Although I'm not sure all of that 8M+ were actual "tasted", it does represent an astronomical number of registrations. Just a couple of data points. - - ferg -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP Desktop 9.6.2 (Build 2014) wj8DBQFGwPUBq1pz9mNUZTMRAlumAKD6t0AQS050YRaaxCqYomMWPDP6NgCgmSFO Frvz42ZtnHXYaRQ8hgXK4LA= =bvP6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson Engineering Architecture for the Internet fergdawg(at)netzero.net ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/