If you are a reader of DotWeekly on a normal basis, you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting any Domain Movers articles lately. Why you may ask? Well, I’m about to tell you.
I always use DomainTools.com and it’s many features to produce the Domain Mover series, it’s simply the best and most accurate. Specifically, I use the Registrant Monitor and have specific companies/services I monitor. These reports yield a total of 750 results max. Prior to mid September, on a normal day monitoring MarkMonitor for an example, I’d weed through about 400-500 domains per day that had some movement of some sorts. These included transfers in, out, domain renewals, dns updates etc.
Suddenly in mid September, every report was getting maxed out at 750 and I was lucky to get through the letter B or C in the alphabet on most reports. What was causing this? Small changes in whois records from the registry of mainly .biz, .info, .org domains. DomainTools was doing the right thing and reporting these changes, they just didn’t fit my needs. These domains were not changing ownership, not transferring registrars etc. Just small registry related changes that triggered a change in whois records.
So, the reports were clogged with data mainly not related to what I had been looking at prior. I knew I was missing domains that did sell or changed ownership but since the reports maxed out at 750 results, there was little I could do.
I always relied on DailyChanges.com, which pick up DNS changes. My routine included using DailyChanges (also a DomainTools offering) and many DNS that I watched. That tool has been limited for a few years now and shows 50 max for “New”, “In”, “out” etc. each. This tool was still useful as the registry changes didn’t change DNS.
But…
At some point recently, DomainTools started adding new gTLD’s to these reports and ccTLD’s. Both DailyChanges and Registrant Monitoring. The reports were clogged before and even more so now! Since I mainly focus on .com domain name sales, my two sources to do my research basically went out the window. Since both are limited, one being 750 results and the other 50 results, I was seeing little changes that trigger my deeper research and simply couldn’t produce Domain Movers any more.
I did try to work with DomainTools to offer filtering tools for the registrant monitoring reports but to my knowledge, those are not something in the works that I’m aware of. At least that way, I could filter the registrant monitoring reports to only show .com domains for an example and I’d be back in the game again. Since you can not currently filter the registrant monitoring reports that I’m aware of, both tools are clogged with data often not pertaining to the domain names actually changing ownership. This results in no Domain Movers reports.
I truly love doing Domain Movers and I think it greatly helps people/businesses and the domain industry as a whole but I currently am unable to produce them due to the above reasons mentioned. If things change or I’m able to find a new way to research the data, I’d be happy to continue them.
Now you know why I haven’t been producing the articles lately and I wanted to be sure you knew the reason why.
I enjoy reading this weekly. It would take a little bit of effort but you could easily duplicate and filter this data if you download the raw TLD Zone file. It would take some effort, but I think a lot of people appreciate this updates. I used to peruse the raw file daily back in the heyday, but it could be cost prohibitive to build out a system that showed movers and filtered out gTLDs.
@Roy,
I have considered building something but it would be really expensive to run (mainly processing power) daily.
This was my absolute favorite series of posts across all domaining blogs, bar none. I hope DT or another data provider (domainiq?) will work with you to get this going again.
What is Ammars problem, why does he treat domainers like crap when it comes to domaintools, put together a proper package dude
@Ron,
Ammar has been great and DomainTools as well. They have a lot of customers and different needs, I think my data usage is a bit unique. Although my requests for being able to filter the Registrant Monitoring would save DT resources/money, I’m not sure the reason a filtering option isn’t available or acted upon. I’ve been asking for it for years actually.
Like many of you, I WAS a paying member of DomainTools for many years. I still use it daily but now I pay DomainIQ for my historical whois lookups and other goodies. Interesting.
I do the same. I wish I could give DomainTools some of my money, but alas….
Thanks Jamie for the update
It was part of my daily read. Too bad…
Thanks for the update Jamie!
Always good to read Domain Movers series. Very informative and helpful 🙂
I too read it always. I hope you’ll find a solution.
Thanks for the update Jamie and thanks for the entertaining info and insights at Domain Movers. Hope you can find a solution and continue one day, even if it’s only once a week or something.
I’ve learned a lot about the scale and sophistication of the proxy domain buying companies (operating in stealth mode) being used by big corporations.