Domain Industry Growth Continues
A couple of news items of note this week demonstrate the continued growth in the domain name industry. First, .ES, the ccTLD for Spain, crossed the one million registrations mark recently. The Registry relaxed rules for ownership of .ES a couple of years back leading to a dramatic rise in the number of registrations. The .ES Registry operator has some stats that show the uptick in domain registrations.
Interestingly, .ES domains outsell .COM domains in Spain. This data comes from a report by Sedo (in Spanish).
Meanwhile, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Industry Brief, domain registrations continue to rise in the first quarter of 2008. The report shows a 26% increase year over year, and a 6% increase over Q4 2007. In total, Verisign reports over 162 million domains across all TLDs.
The report also shows impressive growth among ccTLDs. As a group, they showed 33% growth in the past year. Verisign atributes the growth to special promotions run by the various ccTLD registries, including .ES which has been offering free domains to Spanish youth.
That report can be found at Verisign’s website.
We’ve been ramping up our efforts around Registry promotions at Tucows lately. We’re trying to make sure that resellers are aware of any special pricing that has been offered to us (that we in turn pass on to our resellers). Check the current list and you’ll note that .MOBI has just been added with special promotional pricing beginning on July 8th, 2008.