4 millionth .info domain registration occurred last month; registry releases stats.
.Info domain name registry Afilias announced that the 4 millionth .info domain was registered on February 1, 2007. .Info was one of the first so-called “new TLDs” to be released in 2001. 500,000 .info domains were registered in the first 90 days after launching.
In connection with the announcement, Afilias released a report titled “4 Million Milestone Analysis Report”. The report 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 about the same time, .biz, there’s no comparison — .info is a winner.
However, the report 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 because 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%.
According to the report, 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 report says 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 report 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 according to 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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