Expired domains – a success story from the US about expired websites

The terms 'expired domains' and 'dropped domains' are very common in online marketing. These are website addresses that have been re­gistered, but then not extended or ter­min­ated after the con­trac­tu­al period ended. The domain is then re-released for re­gis­tra­tion. In most cases, website operators secure their domains for longer than the minimum period of a year by remaining re­gistered with a hosting provider for a longer time.

There are many reasons why a domain is deleted or cancelled. When a company shuts down or a project finishes, the entire domain portfolio is deleted. There are many providers that buy these available expired domains and sell them on.

What makes an expired domain es­pe­cially at­tract­ive is how be­ne­fi­cial it is for a website’s off-page search op­tim­isa­tion. In the ideal case, the existing backlink structure can be kept and used. This saves a lot of work, as there’s now less pressure to con­tinu­ously build inbound links. Generally, the value of a website grows or­gan­ic­ally over several years. The value of the domain increases with the search engine ranking and backlinks. The ac­quis­i­tion of an expired domain is a great op­por­tun­ity for website operators to shorten this long path. There are also risks as­so­ci­ated with expired domains: The invested sum for the purchased domain is only worth­while if the website really brings traffic and has a good repu­ta­tion. In the worst case, you 'inherit' any li­ab­il­it­ies the abandoned domain might have – for example, problems with bots, spam attacks, or Google warnings. It is therefore very important to find out as much as possible about the relevant domain in advance.

The New York Times reported about Cameron Harris, a political science graduate, who was able to make a prof­it­able business by pur­chas­ing an expired domain. His idea was called 'A Fake News Mas­ter­piece' by the paper. After finishing his studies, the 23-year-old was looking for a lucrative business model and came up with the idea of carrying out a 'so­ci­olo­gic­al ex­per­i­ment', in his words.

Harris first posted some articles online, but only got a few clicks and comments on them. Only after he accused Hillary Clinton of saying the shooting of Harambe the gorilla was racially motivated, did he first start to get more attention with his stories. Harris then focused on political issues since he realised he could get a lot of clicks this way. Examples include accusing Bill Clinton of being involved in a sex ring for minors, as well as his wife intending to file for divorce.

Harris then explained that he found the expired domain name 'Chris­ti­an­Times­News­pa­per.com' using the provider, Ex­pired­Do­mains.net. He paid $5 (just under £4) to buy this domain for his 'ex­per­i­ment'. According to him, the title of the URL alone should have been enough to show cred­ib­il­ity. Harris published some articles on his newly acquired domain, focusing on the US election campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Harris announced in his top story what con­spir­acy theorists long suspected. 'Tens of thou­sand­s' of Clinton votes had been found in a warehouse in Ohio. Police were in­vest­ig­at­ing, according to Harris’ article. He even added a stock image con­tain­ing a warehouse worker and the alleged ballot papers in boxes. To accompany the image, Harris added the story of a supposed plot with the aim of in­flu­en­cing the outcome of the election. The plan was to smuggle the ballot papers under the completed ballot papers on the day of the counting, making Clinton the unlawful winner.

To help his story spread, Harris set up some fake Facebook profiles and shared the article on his website. It worked: the story about the alleged election fix went viral. Harris earned $5,000 (around £4,000) through Google AdSense from this article alone, since many people were taking the article at face value, clicking on it and then sharing it.

The article received 6 million clicks and was even shared per­son­ally by Trump! The winner of the US pres­id­en­tial election had already used a fake news article to attack political opponents, question the le­git­im­acy of the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion, and disparage the media. This practice ac­com­pan­ied his rise from reality TV star to the highest elected US official.

Harris denied that there was political mo­tiv­a­tion behind the fake news. He was only concerned about the maximum profit that he could obtain with these political issues. When asked if he felt guilty about spreading untruths about a pres­id­en­tial candidate, Harris said that since politics was generally made up of ex­ag­ger­a­tions and half-truths, he hadn’t really done any different to what would normally be the case.

Harris also confirmed that he would have been prepared to go against Trump and promote Clinton with his articles if this tactic had been more lucrative. However, Trump’s sup­port­ers proved far more impulsive than Clinton’s, since the Re­pub­lic­an candidate’s sup­port­ers shared the articles more willingly.

With the story, the political scientist could show his Re­pub­lic­an spirit, but for him it was the $20,000 (£15,500) he generated from Google Ads on his website that made it worth­while. Google, however, quickly withdrew his ad­vert­ising after realising what he was up to.

Harris made a costly mistake: he decided to wait. A few days after the election, Google announced it wasn’t going to place any more ads on fake news sites. A few days later the ads had dis­ap­peared from Harris’ domains and after con­duct­ing a test, an expert reported that his domains were now es­sen­tially worthless.

But all was not lost. Harris had added a pop up on the re-activated expired domain, which en­cour­aged visitors to join a (fic­ti­tious) 'Stop the Steal' team. The aim was for the users to find out how Clinton ma­nip­u­lated the elections and how to stop them. By doing this, Harris was able to collect 24,000 e-mail addresses. What exactly he plans to do with them, is still unclear.