Have you ever wanted to give a domain a test drive before you sunk $9 into buying it for a year? Pool.com just released a new service allowing you to do just that. With their new Catch & Release program, you can register a domain name for 4.5 days to test it out for $.20. A $250 deposit is required to use the service.

Big time domain companies have been doing this for a while. In April, Bob Parsons of GoDaddy fame wrote an expose on the domain name add/drop grace period on his weblog. The add drop grace period allows a registrar to grab a name and drop it within five days without paying for it. According to his data, the vast majority of domains (up t0 92%) are registered and then dropped within five days. Registrats are grabbing the names, testing if they can make any money from landing pages with CPC ads on the domain, and then dropping the unprofitable names.

If I had some more time, it would be an interesting experiment to spend $20/week to register 100 domains. On each site, I would put up a landing page from someone like domainsponsor.com, sedo.com, or make my own landing pages with CPC ads. I would also put the domains up for sale on sites like dnforum.com to try and flip them within the 4.5 day window. If the domains had some traffic, I would hold onto them and work to monetize them for the next year. Between the ads and flipping the domains, I think that it could add up to a nice little business.