.com and .net registry provides added detail about NXD traffic.

VeriSign has enhanced its DomainScore tool to provide more insight into the traffic unregistered domains receive.

DomainScore provides a relative score for the amount of traffic an unregistered domain name receives. But this so-called “NXD” traffic doesn’t qualify the type of traffic very well. That’s part of the reason people complain that they register a domain with a high score based on VeriSign’s data and don’t get any traffic.

The latest update includes time-of-day and location information about unregistered domain traffic.

The column chart above is an example of the traffic insight you can get. Lots of requests but few unique requests? That should be a warning sign. When the traffic comes in may have to do with the type of site.

The geo location data is helpful for a number of reasons. One obvious one: if you’re going to park the domain, you probably want traffic from the U.S. rather than China because it monetizes better.

VeriSign has also enhanced the user interface and historic data for its DomainView tool.

Overstock.com pleads for single letter .com domains in VeriSign contract renewal.

For many years Overstock.com has had an obsession. An obsession with getting the domain name O.com.

As you may know, there are only three one letter .com domains ever registered: q.com, x.com, and z.com. These were registered (and grandfathered) prior to a restriction on one character .com domains being put in place.

Since then, Overstock.com has done everything possible to angle itself for getting o.com whenever it becomes available.

Its latest action is to urge ICANN to make one letter .com domains part of VeriSign’s renewal of the .com contract with ICANN.

One thing’s a good bet: if ICANN ever allows single letter .com domains then Overstock.com will pay whatever it takes and sue whomever it has to in order to get the o.com domain name.

Back in 2005, Overstock.com started beating the drum to release single letter .coms. Here’s how domain attorney John Berryhill tells it in a 2008 article:

The subject of allocating single character domain names has captured the attention of the ICANN community to varying degrees from time to time, primarily depending on the interested efforts of Overstock.com and its advocates. For example, just prior to the December 2005 ICANN meeting in Vancouver, a press release was circulated, and its authors managed to pimp their claim that ICANN was weighing the release of single character domain names to a variety of media outlets (e.g. ICANN weighs single-letter Web addresses USA Today, November 28, 2005). During the 2005 Vancouver meeting, one of the more interesting exhibit tables was run by Overstock.com, for the purpose of distributing baseball caps embroidered with the letter “O”, apparently for the purpose of impressing on the minds of the ICANN community that Overstock.com claims a pre-eminent interest in the letter “O” – and apparently oblivious to the fact that Oakley has longstanding rights in the mark “O” for sportswear. Hence, while rumors spread that Oprah was coming to visit ICANN, the presence of blatant trademark infringement at an ICANN meeting by a member of the Business Constituency was, at least, entertaining.

Overstock.com has always argued that single letter domains should respect “prior use”. Of course, a domain like o.com can’t have any prior use. But that hasn’t stopped the company; it has registered trademarks for o.com. In fact, someone has at least attempted to trademark every single letter .com that could exist. (This is similar to all the companies trying to trademark non-existent top level domains.)

Overstock.com’s obsession with o.com is widely seen as its reason for pursuing other single letter domain names such as o.biz and o.info. It helps the company establish more rights to o.com (at least that will be its argument). It even went so far as to rebrand to o.co, only to pull back.

VeriSign floated an idea of offering single letter .net domain names back in 2010, but later withdrew its request.

One of the tricky parts for VeriSign is the windfall offering single letter .com domains would create. Who should get this money? A lot of people in the internet community would argue it’s certainly not VeriSign that should pocket the money.

VeriSign likely doesn’t want to bring up the single letter issue as it renews the contract. It doesn’t want to do anything to upset the apple cart. The .com monopoly is good enough for it.

So while others debate whether new IP protections should be included in the .com contract or challenge VeriSign’s .com price hikes, Overstock.com continues to focus on a mission. A mission it’s been working on for at least 7 years.

Base of registered domain names continues to grow.

VeriSign released its quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief today, reporting that the total base of domain names increased by 5.2 million last quarter to 215 million.

Registrations have grown by more than 16.9 million since the second quarter of 2010.

The total base of .com and .net domain names passed 110 million. There were 8.1 million new .com and .net registrations during the quarter. VeriSign manages the registry for both of these top level domain names.

VeriSign reports that the rankings of country code top level domain names in terms of registration base stayed about the same. .Eu dropped one spot to ninth and China now holds the number eight spot.

You can view the full report here (pdf).

Here comes your yearly fee increase.

VeriSign has announced its almost-annual price increases for .com and .net domain names.

The wholesale cost from VeriSign for .com domain names will increase from $7.34 to $7.85 on January 15, 2012 and the registry fee for .net domain names will increase from $4.65 to $5.11.

The VeriSign fee doesn’t include ICANN’s 18 cent fee per year. So the wholesale cost of a .com domain name will be $8.03 and a .net will be $5.29.

VeriSign just renewed its contract with ICANN to run .net. It allows VeriSign to continue jacking up .net prices 10% a year. ICANN didn’t provide an explanation for this arbitrary increase.

VeriSign’s press release about the price increase mentions the increasing load of DNS queries the company handles.

Don’t blame VeriSign for raising prices. It’s just making a smart business decision. Blame ICANN.

Tool lets you monitor real time domain registration trends.

After writing about VeriSign’s new beta NXD data tool yesterday, I also learned that the company has upgraded its Domain Tag Cloud into a neat tool to monitor real time domain registration trends.

DomainView incorporates the same data from the tag cloud — keyword frequency in recently registered domain names — and brings it to multiple formats. It also adds domain suggestions so you can see available .com and .net domains that include the hot keywords.

The product comes in several formats including a web app, an API, and an embeddable widget you can place on web sites. There’s also an add-on for Firefox and Chrome that creates a constantly updating ticker on the bottom of your browser. The ticker shows popular keywords in recent registrations and indicates if particular keywords are trending up or down.

VeriSign plans to launch a DomainView iPhone/iPad app soon as well. [Update: the app is now available.]

Combined with DomainScore, savvy domainers can use this tool to find high quality unregistered domain names.