A brief note to mark a historic moment: late yesterday, the 2 millionth .au domain name was registered. To put that in context, back in 2002 (when current name policies were introduced), there were 275,000. Now .au is one of the 10 largest country code domains in the world, and we have just slightly less than one .au domain for every 10 people.
More Than 2 Million .au Domain Names Have Been Registered
Comments
9 responses to “More Than 2 Million .au Domain Names Have Been Registered”
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Sam
Wow, I would have been very close to number 2 million, only registered mine about 6 weeks ago.
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Jason
Is it just me or is your math out a bit?
2 million domain names * 2 people = 4 million people.
Last I heard, we have over 20 million people in Australia, not 4 million.
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Ian Exaudi (Creative Intersection)
This is great to see, although it does make you wonder how many of those domains are being either parked (legitimate owners waiting to get around to putting a site up) or cyber-squatted (unrelated people buying up domains in the hope that a legitimate business will fork out big $$ when they eventually realise that they have built a business name without securing the domain name to boot).
MYOB recently completed a survey of businesses that determined only about 1/3rd of those businesses have an online presence of any kind.
Although many Aussie businesses trade under .com and other international domain names, it does make you wonder how many more .au domain names might be purchased if every Aussie business got their act together and put up at least a basic web presence so their customers could check them out online.
A simple small-business website built by a professional who takes the time to understand your needs often costs under $2K. Of course, more elaborate solutions cost more, but if it’s an appropriate and effective solution then that’s a good price to pay for a good branding and marketing tool.
I had this conversation with MYOB’s Tim Reed and Tony Palmer from C4 a couple of weeks ago on Sky News Business channel’s “Technology Behind Business”.
We all have slightly different points of view but there might be some good ideas in it that are appropriate to your small business, if you have a few minutes to watch the discussion.
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Sam
Cyber squatting is a lot harder on .au as you need an ABN or a Registered Business name to be able to register.
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Ian Exaudi (Creative Intersection)
True, Sam – but these days there’s no real checking mechanism in place that confirms that you actually own the rights to the brand/product/business name … so anyone with any type of AU business ID can purchase pretty much any .au domain and just say it’s “a brand owned by the above business”.
So – the only real disincentive is that the ownership is “known” and published so there’s someone to chase if you feel you are the rightful claimant for that domain.
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Derek Pater
Ian,
you make a point but in the end, as Sam stated, you need a legitimate business to keep those domains, shelf companies will be busted and the
domain will be transferred to the legitimate company in Australia.Aussie domains are better controlled then many others worldwide.
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