30,000+ registrations in good news for city TLDs — .Berlin scores

City domain name rockets out of the starting gate.

The .Berlin top level domain name has quickly racked up over 30,000 domain name registrations as stated by the latest published zone file.

A lot of domain industry insiders think .city domain names have some of the best potential among fresh TLDs, and .Berlin’s quick start is certainly a positive sign.

Perhaps encouraged by the success of Germany’s country code domain name .de, applicants applied for eight city and region names in Germany: .Cologne, .Bayern, .Berlin, .Hamburg, .Koeln, .Saarland, .ruhr and .nrw (North Rhine-Westphalia).

Although that’s a sign that German’s appreciate localized TLDs, it could also be that they by now feel like they have a local TLD and won’t be as inclined to register (or at least use) a city domain. It will be interesting to see how much usage .Berlin domain names get.

German domain name registrar 1&1 registered the most .Berlin domains with over 10,000 registrations, as stated by fresh TLD tracking site NTLDstats.com. Prior to .Berlin 1&1 had registered regarding 15,000 domains, so this is a big boost. (1&1 sister registrars, counting United Domains, have registered more.)

1&1 is giving a free year of .berlin registration to people in Germany and Austria.

A quick scan shows that regarding 1,500 of the domain names are internationalize domain names.

Two of the .city domain names I’m keeping an eye on are .nyc and .London.