I came across Information.com today, which uses the default Domain Sponsor landing page. There are some domain names that resolve to http://searchportal.information.com/?domainname=XYZDomain, and many of them seem to use the default landing page. I am not exactly sure why domain names are forwarded there, but I know Oversee.net is the registrant of Information.com.
Judging by the Compete stats for Information.com, they are getting a ton of traffic, although the trend seems to be dropping for the past few months. In November, Compete reported that Information.com saw 20,667,014 unique visitors, which is down from 27,335,582 unique visitors in January of 2009.
Alexa ranks Information.com #667 out of millions of websites, and Compete ranks it #47. As a comparison, Google is the #1 ranked website for both. There are also 50,000+ Information.com pages indexed in Google, so you can get a glimpse of what domain names appear to be associated to Information.com.
Elliot, do you not have a DomainSponsor account? If you use url redirect instead of their nameservers, you’re supposed to point your domains at searchportal.information.com
We can infer from the graph that less traffic is being redirected to DomainSponsor now than was earlier in the year. There have been rumors about google not wanting their parking partners to use url redirect any more, so perhaps some (large) parking customers have switched to using their nameservers.
Hi Russ,
I don’t have a DS account although almost all of my names are registered at Moniker. I didn’t realize that was happening… The graph was interesting, but the more interesting thing, IMO, is just how much traffic that one url has – and I am sure if you added the other dns that people use it would be much higher. It’s no wonder they’re a domain industry powerhouse!
Here you go! Now you know that parking is big business…
The compete data only estimates traffic from url redirection, not including traffic using Domain Sponsor DNS (which is the preferred way of sending traffic for several reasons…)