eNom offers promotional pricing on domain.

If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines for the .tel top level domain name, your patience may have been rewarded: eNom is now offering the domains for only $2.99 per year under promotional pricing.

.tel domain names don’t function like normal top level domains. Instead, it’s sort of like a business card on the web. You can upload content such as your contact information, links to other web sites, etc. on the domains. Recently functionality was added to insert Google Adsense ads onto the domains as well.

Will lower pricing spur demand for the domain? It’s hard to tell. The domain was launched a little over a year ago, so the TLD just experienced its first major drop cycle. As of the end of last year about 265,000 .tel domains were registered. And with hundreds of new TLDs coming onto the market in a couple years, competition is about to get much more fierce.

A look at end of year numbers for .tel and .asia.

With .tel recently going through its first annual renewal period, and Telnic’s official numbers for end-of-year 2009, I thought I’d compile some stats on the new top level domain.

Total number of .Tel domains registered as of 12/31/09: 263,304

Top 10 registrars of .Tel domains:

1. Name.com LLC 25,344
2. Mesh Digital Limited (DomainMonster) 24,984
3. Key-Systems GmbH 19,581
4. OVH Sarl 13,699
5. EuroDNS SA 13,606
6. Tucows, Inc. 12,211
7. Network Solutions Inc. 10,139
8. Cronon AG 9,206
9. Dotster 7,970
10. Gandi SAS 7,957

Net adds in second half of 2009: 49,239 (or about 8,200 a month)

Number of operational accredited registrars: 117
Number of registrars going through process to offer .Tel: 246

While we’re at it, let’s examine the numbers for .asia as it enters its third year.

Total number of .Asia domains registered as of 12/31/09: 219,949

Top 10 registrars of .Asia domains:

1. Go Daddy.com, Inc. 30,891
2. EuroDNS S.A. 28,781
3. Key-Systems GmbH 13,808
4. MarkMonitor 6,835
5. Mesh Digital Limited 6,716
6. Cronon AG Berlin Niederlassung Regensburg 6,625
7. Communigal Communications Ltd. 6,402
8. Melbourne IT, Ltd 6,313
9. Directi Internet Solutions Pvt. Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com 6,136
10. Instra Corporation Pty Ltd. 5,339

(Note MarkMonitor, which is a corporate brand management firm. It looks like it registered close to 7,000 domains — perhaps defensively — for its clients.)

Net adds in second half of 2009: 3,482 (or about 600 a month)

Number of operational accredited registrars: 122
Number of registrars going through process to offer .Asia: 123

.Tel domain names get IDNs in June.

Coming soon: Jörn.tel, Júlia.tel, and Bjørn.tel.

.Tel registry Telnic is launching registration of .tel Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in 16 languages on June 15. IDNs will be available in Chinese, Danish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.

The company plans to launch more IDNs as other languages are approved for IDNs when there is sufficient demand.

Telnic requested permission from ICANN to offer IDNs back in December, and the request was approved in January.

.Tel IDNs will be offered by many of the same domain name registrars that currently offer .tel. Registration costs are expected to be similar to existing .tel registrations. Although registrants can pick their language for the second level, the top level domain will remain the Latin-character “.tel”.

As of the end of 2009, .tel had approximately 275,000 domain names registered.

.Tel travels into “renewal valley”. How will it come out on the other side?

The folks at .tel registry Telnic are certainly sweating this week: .tel domain names registered during general availability are hitting their first renewal period.

I call this period — when new top level domain names hit there first renewal period — the “valley of renewals”. Renewal raters during this critical time are a barometer for how the TLD is doing as a whole, and the rate can often signify the future of the domain.

When dotMobi hit its first renewal period it lost 10% of its registration base, similar to many other domains.

At the end of last year there were about 275,000 .tel domain names registered. With $35 million invested in Telnic, the base of registered domain names will hardly support the valuation the company must have reached. It needs to grow and it needs to grow quickly. Pay attention to this renewal period to see where it’s headed.

My guess is that many of the people who registered domains this time last year will renew for another year before making a judgment call. I renewed 100% of my .tel domain names: all one of them.

Domains that aren’t used for web sites to get Google ads.

It was only a matter of time, right?

.Tel registry Telnic announced that .tel domain name owners will soon by able to integrate Google Adsense into their domain names. That means they’ll be able to add Google’s pay-per-click ads to their .tel domain names through the .tel management interface. The net effect? You’ll be able to turn a .tel into a parked domain name full of ads.

Technically, .tel users have been able use ads on their domains for awhile, thanks to TelAds. This system allowed users to add their own sponsored ads, but not take advantage of a vast ad network such as Google.

Of course, .tel domains get little type-in traffic. But with other content modules inside .tel, a user could conceivably add content, get ranked, and earn some advertising revenue.

Google Adsense will be enabled on .tel domain names by the end of March. Telnic may ad more ad networks in the future.

.Tel is also working on a page redesign for March. Here’s how the new pages will look.