Reglikedomain industry desk

.Info Hits 4 Million Registrations

4 millionth .info domain registration occurred last month; registry releases stats.

.Info domain name registry Afilias disclosed that the 4 millionth .info domain was registered on February 1, 2007. .Info was one of the first so-called “fresh TLDs” to be released in 2001. 500,000 .info domains were registered in the first 90 days following launching.

In connection with the notice, Afilias released a note titled “4 Million Milestone Analysis Note”. The note touts .Info as a successful alternative to .com. .Info has certainly been a success in terms of registrations. Aftermarket sales have been reasonably strong as well. When you compare .info head-to-head with another TLD that was introduced regarding the same time, .biz, there’s no comparison — .info is a winner.

Still, the note doesn’t mention that many registrars basically give away .info domains. At a buck or two per registration (and at times free), .info domains have been favorites of “search engine spammers” and scammers. In fact, there have been rumors that search engines are starting to discount rankings of .info sites since of their use for splogs and search engine spam. (This has not been confirmed).

United States residents register the most .info domains, owning 48% of the market. Germany is second with 11% and the United Kingdom with 6%.

As stated by the note, 74% of .info domains are “active”. Active is defined as having “some type of content”. This includes parked pages, real web sites, splogs, etc. The note states that “over 1 million are dedicated sites that appear to have unique content”. The definition of “unique content” is broad and I suspect the actual number of domains hosting truly unique web sites is less than half that.

The note also touts recent aftermarket sales of NewYork.info ($46,392), Credit.info ($36,000), and Casino.info ($35,125).

Below are some recent (past 90 days) .info sales as stated by NameBio.com:
Names.info $10,465
Manhattan.info $10,000
Rental.info $7,000
NAW.info $4,558
Evangelist.info $4,500

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