24 March saw the launch of .au direct registrations from auDA and Afilias, and by all counts just over 35,000 new .au domain creates were made on that 1st day of launch!
We suspect that much of this was due to pre-orders offered by Registrars as on the day, considering that there was a tech glitch (now resolved) that made a few domain name registrars a bit hesitant to take orders.
This equates to a good 1.13% of existing .com.au holders ordered their respective .au domains. Still waiting to hear how many brand new creates were done that did not have an existing domain with another extension as that would be a good stat to highlight.
Some more stats, as of 28th March 10am Mel/Syd time.
5,200 ( 8.45%) brand new .au domains with (no match in the priority allocation process)
51,981 (84.46%) single match .au domains (no contest in the priority allocation process)
4,361 ( 7.09%) multiple match .au domains allocated (example just 1x Category 1 holder and/or other tokens rejected)
61,542 .au domains in total added into the DNS
There are a further 9,822 multiple match applications which are in the “contested” state.
Will be more interesting to see the future years 2023, 2024 etc increasing non registrations and non renewal numbers of .id.au and .net.au after the auDA direct .au priority and conflicted names process is over in less than 6 months time.
1% take up is a massive Fail.
Every time someone promotes a .com.au domain name or sends an email from a .com.au address they are supporting the .com.au extension. When you consider that activity has occurred for over 20 years then the investment that has been made in .com.au domains is literally in the multiple billions of dollars. The economics are very simple, it is going to be rather difficult for any extension to compete with that in Australia (.au or otherwise).
Between this implied historical investment in the .com.au extension and the priority process for these new .au domains, it seems rather clear that .au names are dead on arrival. It is just a shame that all it has achieved is confusion and a short term dilution of .com.au domain values. The sooner the market can put .au behind us (as the equivalent has already happened in the UK and NZ) and move forward with a clear view of .com.au’s dominance the better it will be for all stakeholders.
It will definitely be interesting to see what will happen. The size of .nz in terms of growth is around 30%. That is for every 10,000 .co.nz names registered there are 3,000 .nz domain registration, however most of which are to the same users that have registered the co.nz the actual % is unknown without trying to check whois of every new domain registered.
In .au the difference is that com.au require an ACN/ABN/TM, where as .au does not, so we are likely to see a greater adoption of .au here just for that 1 reason alone. This was evident from the 5,200 new .au domains registered that were not tied to a com.au