Domain Magnate

There are 1,426,613 .ru domains registered in total and 60,491 .su
.ru stands for Russia and .su is the obsolete extension of Soviet Union, which is still being used.

But the shocker is all 3 character .ru domains are registered! I could hardly believe that the first time I heard about it mentioned on NP, but a bunch of random checks show that this is true, most appear to be registered by one company: LEGATO LLC and were taken a month ago.

Personally I think the buyout is quite premature, there is hardly enough reseller interest to sustain market values above reg fee for these and it’s highly probably that they will all be dropped in a year, in a same way as it happened to LLLL.com around year 2000, when one company bought about half of them and dropped them a year later realizing it was a bad idea.

One thing is clear though – this should help push the LLL.ru domains prices up on the market. The current prices for these seem to be around $250 and up.

For comparison LLL.ca domains sell for a minimum of $100 now. Canadian tld recently passed 1 million registrations. LLL.co.uk names sell for $1k and up, there are currently about 7 million of them registered.

Forbes.com just released a new billionaires list and Bill Gates is only #3 with $58.0 billions!

Top two positions are taken by Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim Helu & family with 62 and 60 bln respectively.

See the full list here

It’s interesting to note that among top 8 billionaires there are 4 Indians and only 2 Americans. Roman Abramovich, the owner of London Chelsea, is no longer the richest man in Russia, Oleg Deripaska is #9, who is also the youngest in the top 25. Google founders Sergey and Larry are down to positions 32 and 33.

According to Forbes there are currently 1062 billionaires in the world.