The ccTLD has experienced slow growth due to strict registration requirements. Only individuals living in Ireland or companies with trade ties are allowed to register a .ie name. There is an exception to this rule for Community Trademark holders, however. Registrants are also not allowed to register names for resale.

So why register a .ie domain with all these restrictions attached? Because there are so few registrations, a number of premium names are still available. While few good .coms are still available and other countries have sold off their domain gold, there is still a lot of gold left in .ie’s pot. But only if you’re Irish, of course.

One challenge .co presents to sellers is its high renewal fee. At around £20 a year, the names aren’t cheap to hang onto for long periods of time. The same is true with many other ccTLDs. Some cost upwards of £200 or more to renew!

These high renewal fees provide a major incentive for sellers to sell the name as fast as possible. They also turn away buyers. As a result, many .co registrants are looking to sell their names as fast as possible. This drives down market prices across the board. Before registering a ccTLD for resale, take the renewal fee into consideration.

Other recent ccTLD sales include PW.ca for $60,000, StockCharts.co.uk for $48,000 and Material.pl (“fabrics” in Polish) for $25,155. Meanwhile, IDN Haushaltsauflösungen.de garned $16,125. The name is German for “financial resolutions.”

Photo | Flickr

Previously, Columbia only allowed second-level registrations on .com.co, .org.co, etc. It’s one of many countries in recent years to open up their domains to outside investors.

Source | Domain News

Of course, these numbers are a drop in the bucket compared to the 88.4 million active .com domains. There were 45,477 new .com registrations in the last 24 hours alone.

Britain’s .uk domain currently has 8.6 million registrations. The vast majority of these are .co.uk names. Of the 157,463 new .co.uk registrations in June, 147,455 were on the .co.uk subdomain! Internetblog’s extension, .org.uk, only had 8,297 registrations.

Photo | attilio_82

The only real winner of the lot is flights.us, which sold for $11,700. Tailing far behind came airlinetickets.us and creditreports.us for $3,600 each. Gadgets.us fetched $2050, eagle.us $480, spamblocker.us $325 and carpenter.us $1180.

What does this tell us? The .us extension is not a very valuable ccTLD. Sure, there’s more demand for it than most, but .us does not have the same following as .de, .uk or .ca. Based on these results, I would not recommend investing much money in a .us name. Those stubborn Americans are dead-set on sticking with .com.

Photo | bizior

No information about the buyer is known, either. But this sale is important because it gives domainers a benchmark for the value of .ca domains. It is rare for the same .com and .ca domain to sell in a period of just a few months.

If you were to look at the sales and them as a basis for .ca’s value compared to .com, the .ca sale price is about 3.6% of the .com. Does this mean all .ca domains are worth 3.6% of their counterparts? Of course not. The market is often unpredictable and keywords differ in importance from place to place. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use the sale to get an idea of how much you should pay for a .ca.

NIC Mexico, the registery which administers the ccTLD of .mx has launched a new promotional campaign called “Let’s Be More .MX”. The campaign aims to promote more registrations of .mx domains to grow Mexico’s domain market. The idea is to use the projects and ideas of .mx users to reach a greater internet public in Mexico.

Via the site www.seamosmas.mx a community of .mx users is being formed where experiences can be shared and more promotion can take place. It’s a way of making sure that not only users of .mx domains get the full benefit from this ccTLD but that those very users can form the part of promotion for more .mx registrations.

The two other African registrars are Internet Solutions of South Africa and Kheweul of Senegal. The Ghana registrar will now be authorized to register .com, .org, .net, and .info domains. The hope is that this will bring more business to Ghana and surrounding African nations. Ghana Dot Com also aims to encourage more locally-produced websites by people of the Ghana community.

“We hope that this venture will present a platform for hosting more localized content and in local languages to develop the African information resource market,” said Professor Nii Qaynor, Chairman of Ghana Dot Com.

In addition to registering domains, Ghana Dot Com will also host websites. One of their future goals is to become the registrar for country code top level domains (ccTLD) in Africa.

Source: Ghana News Agency
Photo: Flickr

David Curtin, Chief Executive of the IE Domain Registry, blames the slow growth on Ireland’s deep recession, but bad economic times hasn’t stopped domain industry growth in other locales.

It is more likely that the name isn’t being marketed very well and that restrictions are preventing many prospective registrants from using .IE. However, it is also important to keep in mind that Ireland has a relatively small population and many of the multi-national corporations located there probably prefer the more global .com TLD.