Methodology

Purpose



The purpose of NamePulse is to provide statistically derived consumer adoption trends for new domain name extensions (nTLDs). We want to know how the new extensions are being used and identify trends surrounding their usage.

The service was originally created to analyze nTLD registration, deletion and development trends for the purpose of appraisals on EstiBot.com (an Intelium Corp. company)

Factual and Unbiased



Intelium Corp. is a software company.

We have no financial interest in the success or failure of specific nTLDs. We are reporting factual data so that domain name investors, registry operators and brands can make informed decisions. We make money selling data and automation services.

Being unbiased is important because determining domain usage is a highly subjective matter.

Data Quality



Data quality and integrity are extremely important to us and no data is published unless we feel it is accurate and reliable.

We recognize that the data provided by NamePulse is used as a benchmark for determining nTLD performance and as a result we take extreme steps to ensure that we not over-estimate or under-estimate any of the reports we publish.

Consistency and Human Review



Analyzing tens of millions of domain names to determine growth rate, registration trends and usage is a difficult process. We recognize that consistency is important to the domain investment industry and we take steps to ensure that our reports provide consistent and accurate data.

We routinely review our daily results to ensure that domains are properly classified and to add new rules to catch the latest development, placeholder and parking services.

Development



Registry operators and domain investors are sensitive to what constitutes a developed domain, and so are we. After months of testing, we've developed a method for identify developed domain names that produces a balance between what registry operators call developed and what domain investors consider developed.

The question we ask when analyzing every domain name is, does this content bring value to the internet community?

To answer this question we look at the content to determine the following:

  • Uniqueness - We know exactly how many other domains use the same textual content (not template) as the domain we're analyzing. We've discovered a threshold for content uniqueness that indicates development.
  • Site Quality
    • Number of web pages
    • Number of unique words on the home page
    • Number of unique words on the site
    • Commerce/Webstore
  • IP and hosting provider
  • DNS/MX servers

No automated, or human system is perfect, which is why we manually review the reports generated by our automated systems to ensure that they are accurate. We routinely go through the "developed" and undeveloped reports to ensure that we are properly catching all domain names.

Exceptions



Domain names which are reserved by the registry, and which we have a list of are excluded from our daily crawler scans and counts. We've noticed that development percentages are sometimes highly skewed by nTLDs which have a high number of domains which are reserved (they are technically registered, but not used). Consequently, we felt that reserved domain names should not be crawled (because they never have any content, they are not parked, etc) and should also not be counted in the totals when estimating domain usage.

Errors and Omissions



While we take extreme steps to ensure that the data we publish is of the highest quality, we recognize that most of it is generated using automated means and relies on third parties (ex: registires for zone files) and is subject to errors, omissions and inconsistencies. If you spot any errors please contact us immediately and we will do our best to resolve them.

Methodology



There exists no industry standard for determining usage of a domain name, and while some use cases such as "Parked" or "Forbidden" are self evident, others, such as "Developed" are highly subjective.

As a result, we had to develop language and processes for automatically assigning a usage code to all domain names, and a verification procedure for verifying that the automated systems are working properly.

NamePulse crawls all nTLDs every day and generates a digest of the content. The digest is then summarized into TLD and registry "rollup" reports. These are the reports which users can access on our site.

nTLD domain names analyzed by NamePulse fall into one of the following status codes:

  • Parked - Domain names which are monetized on a domain parking platform. This includes public parking platforms (ex: Rook Media, DNS) as well as private parking platforms (ex: Google AdSense for domains feed).
  • Redirect - Domain names which redirect to another domain. We note the redirect domain and redirection extension and include this in our reports.
  • Disallowed - Domain names which display Forbidden, 404 or other server errors on the home page.
  • Not Resolving - Domain names which do not resolve to an IP or whose web server is not responding to queries.
  • Placeholder - Typically newly registered or recently expired domain names which show the registrar's or hosting provider's default placeholder page (ex: coming soon, or this domain has expired).
  • Developed - Domain names which do NOT fall into any of the above categories and which have content deemed "valuable to the internet community".
  • Developed External Frame - Domain names which fall into the "Developed" category but appear to retrieve a large part of their developed content from another domain using a frame.
  • Undeveloped - Domain names which do not fall into any of the above categories.
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