Domain Names News:
Africa domain name to lower Internet charges
The Standard
Local businesses can expect to pay lower fees to obtain website identities when the Africa's first domain name hits the road in 2011. ...and more » EURid: .eu DNSSEC chain of trust complete
Reuters (press release)
"EURid encourages .eu domain name holders, through their registrars, to sign their .eu domain names with DNSSEC, therefore adding digital signatures to all ...and more » HardDrives.com, Computer Hardware Domain Name & Website to be Auctioned Off at ...
DigitalJournal.com (press release)
8 /PRNewswire/ -- Epik.com, a leading domain name development company, has released a list of developed domain names to be auctioned off on September 16, ...How to Name Your Domain for SEO
The Positive SEO Blog Community (press release) (blog)
As much as possible choose .com tld's instead of other domain extensions this is because such top level domain is a lot more popular among internet users, ...and more » 
Daily MonitorWeb Host MyHost Expands Name Server Infrastructure to Europe
Web Host Industry Review
“DNS coverage of both USA and EU based IP addresses will certainly help customers migrate their already existing websites and domain names to MyHost servers ...The Dot-Pro Domain Helps Give Professionals an Edge in the Job Market
eReleases (press release)
Professionals registering their name with EnCirca also receive a free directory listing in Find.Pro (http://www.Find.Pro), the Internet's business directory ...and more » Useful Points for Right Domain Name Selection
lonad News
Thus having an appealing and good domain name is very necessary even for making lasting first impression. Never choose bad domain names as it would haunt ...Dubai Airport Freezone Announces The Arabic Domain Names Of Its Official Website
Al-Bawaba
With a substantial increase in the number of internet users in the region, the company's Arabic domain names will allow a greater number of the Arab ...and more » Hebrew characters now permitted in domain names
Global Gold Internet Services
Jewish internet users are now able to register domain names in Hebrew, it has been announced. The Israel Internet Association has confirmed that the .il ...
Ecommerce sites 'should consider other online outlets'
ecommerce store should look into making use of other estores when trying to sell their goods, it has been suggested. In an article for Media Post, managing partner and president of Catalyst SF Cory Treffiletti said this form of online retail is often overlooked by companies.
The expert recommended looking into selling products on websites such as Amazon.
“These sites offer huge reach, targeted placements to actual shoppers and access to lots and lots of behavioural information,” Mr Treffiletti commented.
He asserted that while it might cost a bit to consider selling through these ecommerce outlets, firms could find that “standard ads on these sites can move products”.
Other online marketing strategies that the expert said are often overlooked included affiliate marketing and banner ads.
This comes after a study by Nielsen Online suggested that convenience, choice and value are what ecommerce customers look for in a site.
China tops ccTLD registries for Q3 2008
Verisign’s Third Quarter Domain Name Industry Brief included a table from Zooknic that showed .cn to be the most popular ccTLD, ahead of Germany’s .de and the United Kingdom’s .uk.
The Netherlands (.nl), the European Union (.eu) and Argentina (.ar) followed in positions four to six, ahead of Italy (.it), Brazil (.br), the United States (.us) and Australia (.au).
For China, it was first time that its ccTLD had been ahead of Germany’s in the rankings, while Brazil’s rose to a new high of eighth place and Australia’s made its debut in the top ten.
Of the most popular ccTLDs, only .eu experienced superior growth in the third quarter when compared to the previous three months.
China topped the list as several new domain names for the country’s government websites were announced, People’s Daily Online reported.
Tennis Australia plays with domain 'scalper'
Steven Deare, ZDNet Australia
Update Tennis Australia has admitted it paid a “hefty fee” to a scalper of the domain name kind in order to obtain the Web address it wanted as part of a rebranding campaign.
Australian tennis’s governing body this month launched tennis.com.au as part of a marketing campaign. Speaking at the Australian Open yesterday, Tennis Australia CEO Steve Wood revealed the organisation purchased the domain name from a cyber-squatter after a couple of years of negotiations.
“We bought it from a friendly cyber-squatter. We’ve been trying for a couple of years to convince this group that we were better with that site than them and they weren’t doing much work with it,” he said.
Tennis Australia paid a “hefty fee” to the Sydney-based group, but less than a six-figure sum, said Wood. He would not reveal the group’s identity other than to say they were not sport-related.
“It’s quite common, I might say, that domain names are bought and traded and so on. And we’re very excited now that we’ve got that.”
Wood has 18 years IT experience having worked for several vendors including Nortel Networks before joining Tennis Australia 18 months ago.
Tennis Australia’s payment to the cyber-squatter comes as several sporting and entertainment promoters recently upped their fight against ticket scalpers. Both Cricket Australia and the Big Day Out last year took new measures against people buying tickets purely for re-sale purposes.
Wood, however, had no qualms with the ethics of the purchase.
Asked if he agreed the purchase was like paying a ticket scalper, Wood said: “Yeah, perhaps, but from my perspective, we needed all the tools of our trade to run our business.
“And for whatever reason someone else had that tool and I needed to get it and for a fee I was able to extract that.
“Now we have that, and now the sport is better off for it. And we’re executing on that opportunity.”
The tennis.com.au site will be redeveloped again in the second quarter of this year to improve Tennis Australia’s business.
“We’re going to have that as our key window to the world,” said Wood.
“[Tennis.com.au] will give us new revenue streams. We’ll be able to sell from that site. We’ll be selling merchandise, perhaps photos, archived footage, all of the things that we can commercialise.
“We’re going to go much earlier on pre-sale for tickets. We’re going to be much more flexible on how you’ll be able to buy your tickets, because that’s one of the things we see our customers looking to extract from their experience.”
Steven Deare travelled to Melbourne as a guest of IBM.
Domain Names Growth trends for the past 3 years
- China (CNNIC) is the lead contributor to such growth and immense size of domain name which is accumulated to 13,572,326 domain names registered and growing. (They broke the 14m mark this year).
- Russia had the fastest growth rate of 11% quarterly , followed by DENIC by 12,448,242 domain names.
- Argentina has about 1,767,273 as of Oct 08. (This is partially because domain name is fully subsidized by the government)
- ccTLD registry has begun slowly to grow larger than most of gTLDs except for .COM.
- .BIZ, .INFO , .ORG, and .NET although in the millions, is slowly losing it’s appeal. Sad to say, domain name that is normally associated with the mention extension has always had a bad image and often associated with spam, phishing sites. I’m aware that PIR(The body that runs .ORG) is doing something about this. Read here and here and here.
- Countries have begun to start taking their ccTLD more serious especially established countries and some governments have begun to take initiatives to boost their ccTLD numbers.
- Internet users in Asia is the highest at the moment even if North America and Latin America sum up, they are still lacking quite a far bit behind.
- As reported in Verisign Domain Name Brief 2009, 12% of 90m of .com/.net has no websites and 24% has a single page site which means 36% of .com/.net 90m, sums about 32,400,000 domain names serves no site or only a single page site.
Predictions for the next 5 years would be (in no specific order):-
- Established country who posses strong Internet presence will continue to grow off the charts especially European countries.
- China will continue to be the largest ccTLD around if not, almost on par with .com. CNNIC currently only have 14m domain names where as the entire population in China is at 1,330,044,544. What CNNIC has now, is still a marginal of the mass population.
- Technology driven countries such as Korea and Japan will have a steady growth of domain names but marginal only.
- The moment new gTLD is released, .com domain name will continue to climb because of brand protection and internet users see as .com as the grandfather and defacto of extensions. But there is another opinion behind this which i’ll leave out for the moment.
- .BIZ, .INFO , .ORG, and .NET will continue to be where are they right now because new gTLDs will be more specific and market oriented, targeting only a specific set of users and users won’t see it’s necessary to purchase other gTLD extensions especially if they have to start purchasing names from their respective ccTLD and protecting it in .com as well.
Internet Users 2008
- 1,463,632,361 The number of Internet users worldwide (June 2008).
- 578,538,257 Internet users in Asia.
- 384,633,765 Internet users in Europe.
- 248,241,969 Internet users in North America.
- 139,009,209 Internet users in Latin America/Caribbean.
- 51,065,630 Internet users in Africa.
- 41,939,200 Internet users in the Middle East.
- 20,204,331 Internet users in Oceania/Australia.
Nationals register 'Nathan Rees' domain
By Matt Wordsworth
The New South Wales National Party is under investigation for registering the website nathanrees.com.au.
The web is set to play its most prominent role yet in a New South Wales state election.
All parties have taken to it like never before and both leaders and most ministers have a presence on sites like twitter and Facebook.
But the battle for the cyber world has turned nasty.
The Nationals have beaten the ALP to the website nathanrees.com.au, shelling out $127 to register it for themselves.
State director Ben Franklin denies it was going to form part of a dirty tricks campaign.
“No not at all, we were never intending to actually use the site,” he said.
“What we’re doing is showing the Labor Party is deeply embarrassed about their own Premier.”
But it could be the Nationals left blushing. In the cyber world it is called name jacking and Australia’s internet regulator says it is against the rules.
“We police it fairly heavily. We take domain names off people all the time if they don’t meet the policy,” auDA chief executive Chris Disspain said.
“I’ll institute an investigation immediately and I imagine it will be dealt with in the next couple of days, irrespective of what the National Party think they’d like to do with it.”
But Mr Franklin says the Nationals are happy to give it back.
“If the Labor Party write to us and ask for the site back we’re very happy to give it to them,” he said.
“In fact, we’ll give it to them for free because we know they’re going through some tough times at the moment.”
The Nationals say they registered the site in May. By that stage Mr Rees had been Premier for eight months.
What is more intriguing is the website Labor already had registered – carmeltebbutt.com.au – a move that is sure to stoke more leadership speculation.
Labor’s state secretary Matt Thistlethwaite was not available for interview.
Vendor wanted 'tens of thousands' for Rees domain name!
The boss of the New South Wales Labor Party says he rejected an offer to pay tens-of-thousands of dollars to secure the domain name nathanrees.com.au
As the ABC revealed yesterday, the Nationals are under investigation for improperly registering the domain name.
The Nationals say at the time the Premier’s domain name was available, but the carmeltebbutt.com.au website had already been bought by the ALP.
Carmel Tebbutt is Mr Rees’ deputy, prompting further speculation about the longevity of Mr Rees’ leadership.
Labor’s State Secretary Matt Thistlethwaite has explained the situation saying that, last October, the party was approached by a man who wanted to sell the Nathan Rees domain name for tens-of thousands of dollars.
Mr Thistlethwaite says the offer was refused.
The Nationals State Director Ben Franklin says he has never heard of the man named by Matt Thistlethwaite.
He maintains the Nationals bought the name legally in May for 127 dollars and that no-one from his party offered to sell the site to Labor.