Posts tagged "dead-web"

3 posts found.

July 23, 2026 22 min read

Who Moves the World's DNS: 15 Months of Delegation Flux, a One-Month Million-Domain Migration, and the Nameservers That Outlive Their Owners

We followed the NS delegation of every apex domain across nine full crawls, April 2025 - July 2026 (404 million apexes). 61% of the web kept the exact same nameservers for fifteen months; operator switching runs at 2.3% a month; and the biggest moves were corporate re-plumbs - GoDaddy consolidating 2.1 million NameFind domains onto Afternic, Namecheap shifting 1.1 million parked names to an undocumented platform in one month. Meanwhile 339,000 domains still delegate to the retired Dan.com. For DNS operators, security teams, and Internet measurement researchers.

July 10, 2026 18 min read

The Parking Lot: We Measured the Parked Web Every Month for 38 Months — It Grew to One Domain in Four, Peaked Five Days After Its Business Model Died, and Has Been Shrinking Since

26 monthly DNS snapshots, April 2023 to June 2026: domains pointing at parking, for-sale, expiry and registrar-default landers grew from 16.0% to a peak of 25.5% of all website records — 73.6 million domains — then began the first sustained decline on record, in the exact quarter Google switched off the parking ad economy and Bodis shut down. GoDaddy front doors hold three-quarters of the lot. For measurement researchers, registrars, security teams, and anyone who counts 'websites'.

July 02, 2026 18 min read

The Half-Life of a Domain: We Tracked 181 Million Resolving Websites for 38 Months — 63.5% Are Still Alive

We followed every one of the 181.1 million domains that resolved in April 2023 across 26 DNS snapshots to June 2026, and did the same for a 246.8-million-domain 2025 cohort. The resolving web loses 13-15% of itself every year — a half-life of roughly five years — but the deaths are wildly unequal: Freenom's five TLDs went 99% extinct in the largest die-off ever recorded in the DNS, the cheap-promo gTLDs lose up to 95% of their web in three years, and Germany's .de keeps 84% alive. For registrars, investors, security teams, and anyone who links to anything.