Patent for predicting domain name renewal rates — Verisign gets
A crystal ball for estimating domain name renewal rates.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark office has granted patent number 9,094,467 to Verisign for “Method and system for predicting domain name registration renewal probability”.
Simply: take a number of factors regarding the domain name and its history to calculate the chances of it being renewed.
Verisign has to run these calculations frequently, and not just for its own forecasting. Since of the renewal grace period, it can’t give final renewal rates until 45 days following a domain expires. As a public firm, it gives some guidance to analysts on each quarterly investor call even though it’s not 45 days following the end of the quarter.
Some of the factors the patent embodiments consider:
- registration information
- hosting details that can include nameserver data, webserver data, and/or mail server data for the domain name
- domain lookup statistics for the domain
- information regarding a website hosted at the domain
- length of time the domain name has been registered
- number of continuous times the domain name registration has been renewed
- the length of time the domain has been registered without becoming unregistered
- status of the website hosted at the domain
- purpose of the website hosted at the domain
You can view the patent here (pdf).
