.uk 2LD registered domain name statistics to date

Approximately 250,000 .uk second level domain names ("2LD") have been registered to date, according to Nominet. They plan to release more statistics, broken down by extension, in the future.

 

Not as bad as I thought considering most domainers haven't been registering them and hold quite a large proportion of all uk domains out there (not sure of percentage, must be a fair chunk?). Would really love .uk to succeed, domains would look so much better using them, but .co.uk is too far embedded in the mindset of visitors now I feel. Come on BBC, make the move!

 

Why don't you contact the BBC and suggest they embrace .uk? The more people that do perhaps the more likely they might.

 

I have through direct contacts, but there hasn't really been a conclusive reason. I suspect that leverage from Nominet is needed on many of the larger organisations.

 

That's fantasy talk because it's never going to happen. Back to reality... I suspect many comments by individuals might carry more weight than communications from the registry with an obvious direct interest.

 

The shorter url is, as you remind us, an upside. A future upside might be the embracement of a url convention that appears "better", newer and more current/more of the moment than the url convention currently utilised. That takes the right people and entity to suitably demonstrate it as part of wider marketing. Companies change logos for all manner of reasons. I realise that there may be search engine consequences for considering a change of domain name (url) but those consequences are not insurmountable.


(from iPhone)

 

It wouldn't be my decision to make but if the people at a hypothetical business felt they wanted to consider embracing a new URL scheme that they felt might work well with wider marketing I'd suggest they considered .uk 2LD's. If a hypothetical business asked me what benefits they might receive I'd work with them to understand their requirements and see what the ultimate feeling was. I am aware of some of the pros and cons and I would do my best to present them. Further research would be required on a per business basis. If as a business owner I wanted to project the kind of things I mentioned in my previous message and doing that was more important than other things, adopting .uk 2LD's might better enable me to do this. The facility to register a .uk 2LD is still quite new and unlike most new gTLD's I believe it should make far more sense to a wider audience because the notion of domain names ending in "uk" is widely understood.

(from iPad - B)

 

As said business owner, with e-commerce presence, I'd not consider the move from .co.uk to .uk because of the investment required in switching for very little gain. I could however see advertising/marketing/design based companies seeing the move as beneficial and fresh. If I was setting up a new business, I'd be tempted to go with .uk but obviously ensure the .co.uk forwards to it.

 

I would say 15% of that 250k is domainers. I have no solid data to back this up, but here is what data I do have.

My own database is around 4-5m names, giving me average drop lists of 6,000-6500, of those which drop around 70-100 are caught (a significant drop on last time I did this math which I think was average 90-130 caught), around 60% take the .UK and are not unfamiliar names.

So around 220 days since launch, gives around 12,000 names on the day catches/regs, allowing for those picked over the following days (no data on these), and the fact I only have half the total names, and allowing for new regs not based on drops, then adding in speculative prime name regs, I'm saying 10-15% are domainers.

So 200,000 are potentially businesses, and equates to about 1,000 per day, given that nom claimed was it 50,000 in the first month ?

 

250k is significantly higher than I was expecting, I have to say.