An average of 19,260 domain names expire every day. This number has increased tremendously since the same time last year when expired domain name figures were more like 1,200 daily. The expired domain name market is becoming increasingly popular with webmasters, who are locked in a fierce competition to stay one step ahead and get all the best domain names. The question is why do webmasters find someone else's old domain name so interesting?

What happens a lot of the time is people register a domain name, or purchase it for a year, they develop a web site and advertise it, to get targeted traffic. This takes a lot of time, money and effort, then due to unfortunate circumstances they may forget to re-register their domain, either they have lost interest, over looked a reminder that domain renewal was due or changed their e-mail address during the year that they used to register. Then just like that the domain name is up for sale.

Because of this, the domain, or address that they have created and all targeted traffic with the domain name becomes available for purchase. Thousands of these expired domain names are available every day. There are several tricks to knowing how to find these domain names, and how to know which domain names are valuable and which are not, and, most importantly, how to get to them first.

There are many benefits for picking up an expired domain name, unlike a new domain name, the expired name already has traffic that can come from search engine promotion, directories, forums, back links and a whole host of other promotion methods. Webmasters are using this to their advantage, either selling the domains for a profit, selling a web site with traffic already entering the site, or use as valuable sub domains for their own enterprise, thus increasing traffic to their own sites.

Quite often webmasters will register with an online service that notifies them daily of pending expiry of domain names, that will soon be up for purchase. This can keep a web master that desired extra step ahead of competitors. Competition for expired domain names, especially one word, catchy .com names is fierce, as they are in high demand and easy to remember, having most likely been around for a long time. So it is not surprising that some of them can be very valuable, for instance, a domain name could sell for $1M, yet it only costs $10 to re-register.

Benefits for acquiring an expired domain name are numerous, depending on what you want to do with it. For a small sum of around $10-$15 you have the potential of increasing traffic to your web site instantly, saving you a considerable amount of time, money and bother. It could be the cheapest targeted web site traffic around.