.De data is a good PR and marketing tool.
I must admit that I don’t follow the .de domain market much. I should, since Germany’s ccTLD is the largest country code domain name in existence with over 15 million domain registrations.
There are a lot of reasons for .de’s success, and it’s clear that one of its success factors is marketing.
Today .de registry DENIC sent a release to me about its latest data on regional registrations. Since 2004 the company has been collating data on which cities and regions in Germany have the most .de domain registrations. It’s interesting to compare this data to prior years.
I think this is pretty brilliant. You may not consider it marketing, but the local press (at least in the U.S.) eats up stories like this. “We’re ranked number 1!”
Other country code operators should take note. (I’m looking at you, Neustar.)
Several years ago, Neustar made a big deal about how they were on the verge of a huge advertising push for .US country code.
I think Ron may have even covered it in the DNJournal. Seems like there were a few different things they were going to do to market .US to the general public.
I guess they forgot.
Looking at .de, .br and .ca can really make one wonder what happened to .us.
Regional data similar to the one above, but for .br:
(translating browser like Chrome required)
http://cetic.br/dominios/estados.htm
Research data on which TLD companies with 10+ employees have as their main domain:
http://cetic.br/empresas/2011/c-int-06b.htm
(In short: .br 92%, .com 6%, others 2%)