Domain Magnate

DomainPulse reports:

China (.cn) has overtaken Germany (.de) to become the world’s largest country code for domain names. With an average of around 400,000 to 500,000 .cn domain names registered each month it would be safe to assume there are more than 12,300,000 names registered compared to 12,098,279 .de names registered at the time of writing.

The two ccTLDs (country code top level domains) are much larger than any of their competitors with the next ccTLD being .uk (United Kingdom) with 6,880,775 and close to three million .nl (Netherlands) domain names.

Of all TLDs, ccTLDs and gTLDs, only .com is larger than .cn and .de, followed by .net, while .org and .uk are roughly equal in fifth position.

The success of Germany’s country code has been due to few restrictions on the eligibility of registrants for .de domain names and a low price. Although France has a similar population, there are currently only 1,153,637 registrations.

These extraordinary registration rates are a result of extremely low reg fees in .cn domains. Regular domainers from all over the world can buy .cn domains for just $0.13 at a variety of sites. A predeposit is usually required.

Bigger resellers can get the domains for even cheaper paying just pennies on the dollar.

My guess is once the reg fees rise there registration counts for .cn will fall dramatically, unless we start seeing some high sales to support the tld growth

New DnJournal Report is Up:

Moniker.com closed the $850,000 sale of SkiResorts.com this week, a deal that ranks as the fourth highest sale reported so far in 2008. Moniker handled the sale for Rick Latona who sold two other domains that landed on our Top 20 chart through his own site, RickLatona.com. One of those, StCatharines.com, completed the top ten after going for $19,000. Sedo.com had a big week sweeping 11 of the 20 chart entries. Their roster was led by #2 Madrid.net at €28,000 ($43,920) while #4 Celibataire.com (“single” in French) and #5 Hoteles.info (“hotels” in Spanish) gave them three of the top five spots. Madrid.net banked €28,000 ($43,920) while Hoteles.info booked €19,500 ($30,607). Pool.com rounded out the first five with #3 Banks.ca (Canadian country code) depositing $41,000 in the year’s 8th biggest ccTLD sale.

By Ron Jackson

The AfternicDLS also had a solid outing with four names on the elite list including #6 ContemporaryRugs.com ($30,000) and #9 HowToInvest.com ($23,000). This was a strong week for non .com domains as they took nine places on the Big Board. Three of those were .orgs, two were .nets, two were .infos and two were ccTLDS. That trio of .orgs was led by #7 Compraventa.org (“purchase” in Spanish), sold at Sedo for €18,000 ($28,253)

Interesting registry statistics published on domainnews.com

There were almost 33 million new domain names registered in 2007 according to the fourth quarter 2007 Domain Name Industry Brief published by VeriSign. This brings the total of domain names registered to more than 153 million domain name registrations worldwide across all of the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs). This represents a 27 percent increase over the same quarter last year, and 5 percent growth over the third quarter of 2007.

Of these registrations, the .com and .net adjusted base surpassed 80.4 million domain name registrations at the end of 2007. This represents a 24 percent increase year over year and a four percent increase quarter over quarter. The adjusted base grew by 3.5 million domain names in the fourth quarter and 15.4 million over the entire year. New .com and .net domain name registrations were added at an average of 2.5 million per month in the fourth quarter 2007 for a total of 7.5 million new registrations. read more »