It’s another big “dropping” day on the expired domain name auctions. So I thought it would be interesting to explore some “numbers”.
Firstly, for those that may not understand the term “dropping”, this means that a previously registered domain name has not been renewed (for whatever reason), and at approximately 1pm today, becomes available for registration again. The best of these domains – a very small % – will be purchased via one of the three drop catching platforms. The rest will be “purged” or “deleted” from the registry and become available again.
Here Are Some Stats
- There are 1674 expiring domain names today (according to Netfleet).
- Assuming an average registration cost of say $30 per domain, that means that 2 years and 30 days ago, registrars received income of $50,220 on that particular day.
- Based on normal take up rates on the daily auctions, somewhere between 1% and 3% of these 1674 domains will be purchased today. That’s between 16 and 50 (the latter figure is being very generous!).
- You do the maths yourself – how much money goes down the gurgler each and every day?
- Sometimes you can see when someone has had what they thought was a terrific business idea at the time. Today is one of those days – there are 83 four number domains expiring today. These range from 1215.com.au to 9726.com.au. Ouch!
Ask Yourself This
With only just over 3,039,000 .au domains in existence as at July 2016 (according to AusRegistry) – and over 1000 domains on average expiring each and every day – do we really need to open up the market with the introduction of “direct registrations” i.e. domainer.au?
Who benefits?
Ned O’Meara – 25th August 2016
Disclaimer
Hi Ned, I’m in favour of the .Au – The big mistake many moons ago was to have.com.au – it should have always been .au from the beginning. We have some generic domains and we constantly have issues with the .com version and the company in the US using subdomains to trick aussies of the .com.au and .au – the .au won’t hurt your business – but it will help many many business really solidify we are Australian, and get rid of the.com. I’m so excited and i can’t wait for it to be introduced. ( but they have to protect all the .com.au and just give us the.au for a select period. )
there’s my 2 cents.
Chris you obviously have not read enough on the issue. Do some more research and do not be fooled by the information some bodies and registrars are putting out to push for their own money making interests.
Hopefully you where not fooled by one registrars ” yes only survey vote” form they sent into auDA which swayed vote results falsely.
i also recommend that topic others are talking about. It seems to be a major problem and why some people are leaving auDA out of disgust.
https://www.dntrade.com.au/threads/direct-registrations-are-happening.10629/
Using a .au will not result in less confusion, it will be more confusing because surfers expect .com.au. So the guy who promotes whateverdomain.au is going to have to put up some visits going to whateverdomain.com.au, some visitors going to whateverdomain.com and some visitors just not knowing what the heck is going on when they see that url.
What should have been done in 1986 (.com.au vs .au) is a bit of a moot point today, the standard is .com.au, that is what everyone in the country expects a local site to be on.
There’s a good chance those 4-digit domains were registered with an eye toward China. Short numerical domains are especially prized in that market, with 3-digit .COMs selling near the $1 million USD mark. During the 2015 “Chinese Surge”, global speculation in this sector reached fever-pitch exuberance, as investors chased prices that seemed to double weekly.
Domainers worldwide bought up 5 and 6-digit numerical strings in virtually every domain extension imaginable, hoping to cash in on Chinese trading. Some did. But 2016 has been the hangover.
China loves brevity above all; so any 2LD extension (with 5 letters and 2 dots) would find negligible market demand among the Chinese. Also, both China and Australia are name spaces with an extra burden of regulation, making trading between the 2 markets especially difficult. As a result, NNNN.com.au domains are dropping for good reason.
It’s easy to see who benefits. auDA and the registrars.
Although it would have been a good idea to simply have the first direct .au ccTLD in the beginning as default, we all know this is not what happened. It’s not what Robert Elz designed. The .com.au system has been working perfectly well for the last 20 years, and has been very popular with over 80% of Australian domain registrations preferring this 2LD.
Should we now introduce .au direct registrations, when, as Ned says, thousands of .com.au’s are being purged and going back on the market every day?
I still don’t see a need for it. However, for some reason, as we are all watching, a lot of the heads of auDA and registrars are pushing for it.
auDA have said it is now going ahead, due to their “research” and the names policy panel recommendations. However, a lot of us domainers have found that their “research” was pretty one-sided (one question survey aimed at finding out whether or not people would register “yourname.au” if it was available) and there has now been some recently-admitted conflicts of interest on the auDA board. Not to mention huge amounts of businesses are now complaining about this possible “triple-dipping” concept. Where business-owners already own the .com.au and will have to secure the .net.au so their competitors don’t put their hand up to have equal rights to own the direct .au when and if it becomes available.
I’ll tell you one thing.
If this direct .au registration comes into being, the following rules should apply:
1) Every person who owns any form of Australian (xxx.au or xx.au) TLD should be able to have equal rights to the direct .au – and yes this includes ALL TLD’s including .asn.au and .net.au having equal rights to the direct .au (not just .com.au holders).
The reason for this is: if .au comes into being, technically everyone who owns the exact match name version has a right to owning the license to their equivalent direct .au including: .com.au or .net.au or .org.au or .asn.au or .id.au or edu.au(.) If this is not granted, technically, someone who owns the .edu.au version of the exact match name can legally pursue to have it. You can imagine the thousands of legal cases that will start up if auDA only choose to give the .com.au owners first rights. It would be one of the biggest mistakes they ever make.
2) An email should go out to every single Australian 2LD license holder. If an existing 2LD license holder doesn’t put their hand up to claim the direct .au ccTLD within 30 days, they miss out on registering the direct .au ccTLD altogether. The reason for this is simple. If a domain name owner doesn’t even bother to read an email from auDA, pointing out to them that they have to put their hand up for a chance to claim their direct .au registration (by notifying their registrar), then they obviously don’t really care about, or deserve the name. And any amount of time over 30 days is just slowing up proceedings unnecessarily.
3) If the parties who put their hand up to claim their exact match direct ccTLD version of their name across all Australian 2LD’s can’t agree amongst themselves who should be able to own the direct .au (meaning, they can’t buy each other out until only one person is left with their hand up), then the direct .au should be locked for only 1 year, and then released to the open market for the highest bidder.
One more thing.
The amount of time it is taking auDA to now say that they definitely ARE going to implement this direct registration, or not, and what exactly the rules are going to be, is ridiculous.
“The amount of time it is taking auDA to now say that they definitely ARE going to implement this direct registration, or not, and what exactly the rules are going to be, is ridiculous.”
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Isn’t AUDA falling apart because of the scandalous nature of the .au vote?
The CEO was sacked with 30 days of the vote and yet the vote result wasn’t announced until after he was sacked. It took AUDA 2 months & a sacked CEO to tell the world what the vote result was.
Then 3 board members resigned recently. I’m just guessing here because AUDA has zero transparency on what is going on but to me it sounds like there there is huge issues with that .au vote and the conflicts of interest that resulted in the “yes” vote. AUDA clearly needs to come clean but they are probably stuck in legal limbo land taking advice on what that vote actually means.
Time for the Government Department of Communications to take over management of the Australian domain name admin system.
The $ million that Ausregistry and auDA make is better going to this Department for better use in Australia.
What exactly does auDA do each day?
Can’t the root system of .au management be handled by Government? They have the most secure servers and then the data is protected. Now Ausregistry is owned by a foreign company many worry about this and profits going offshore Australia is better to have.
Statistics show the .uk, .sg, .hk. nz direct extensions have been a failure.
There are over 3000 different domain name extensions now available and the last thing australia needs to do is stuff up the Australian value in .com.au.
With the available aftermarket if people want a name they can easily probably buy it already or they can register the existing available .net.au verions.
The fact is direct registrations and new extensions are pushed for the purpose of making more money by bodies such as auDA, Ausregistry / Neustar Inc ( USA) , ICAAN ( USA) etc.
This has a lot of good facts. https://www.dntrade.com.au/threads/direct-registrations-are-happening.10629/
https://www.dnc.org.nz/the-commission/reports
“Figure 3 shows the total number of domain names increased from 640,342 (at 1 April 2015) to 656,607 (at 31 March 2016) – a growth of 16,265, or 2.5 percent. The dip between February and March 2016 reflects the one-year anniversary of the end of the preferential registration and registration period – an important part of the registrations direct at the second level change. It appears that some registrants, having exercised their preferential registration rights, have subsequently let the shorter version of their name drop.”
Speculation usually ends in tears unless, the idea, concept, novelty is new to the market and contains an element of social value. “.au” if implemented will be just another extension (nothing new) riding the backs of small business as a hidden tax on an already overburdened business sector.