Unused .com Domains

Ever tried registering a domain to find out the one you want is already taken? This is becoming a frustrating issue for more and more people every year. Even more, many of these domains go unused. Christopher Forno was particularly concerned with the issue and decided to take action.

He created a web application that crawled a number of websites to test the legitimate registered domains and broke them down into their own categories:

  • In Use (Sites that actually contained content.) 
  • Speculation (Sites that we’re used for ad purposes,)
  • For Sale
  • Gambling
  • Not In Use
  • No Web Server
  • Error
  • and Parked Domain


What he learned was that unused website made up about 13 million of the 137 million registered .com domains. Those are pretty high numbers for unused websites. So why would someone buy an unused domain? Well, the owners of these unused sites may buy them hoping to flip them for a higher amount of money. Or maybe they just bought it and didn’t want it anymore, waiting for their subscription to expire.

If you want to learn more about the details of this study, check out Chris’s article