It's obvious there is going to be a huge year-on-year dip in .uk registrations, with probably almost half of all .uk domain names not being renewed by the end of the summer. That's because most of the registrations are ludicrous.
Personally I think .uk domains can be really useful for particular brands and I figure there are around 50,000 that come up for renewal in any one year that are useful in that way. As for way over a million others that will be discarded, by the time Namesco, 123-reg, Fasthosts and Ionos have offloaded in the first half of this year, reality will be inescapable in the Nominet stats (you can't just keep on offering free registrations for ever).
That said, in the small % of .uk domains among the dropping million that do have use and modest value, there are some that I'd be delighted to acquire. Collectively, it is a kind of ROR all over again, and there will be days in January and early June when a shed load of catchers will be peppering the system in the hope of acquiring some windfall names.
I'm not sure how things will unfold with GoDaddy's registrations, as they operate a different model and the names can be intercepted before they drop. But with regard to the vast majority of .uk names, they are absolute garbage. It always astonishes me when I look at the drop lists: just what goes through people's minds when they register some of these names? A crappy domain is (in brand value) worse than no name at all. Because it just looks so amateur.
With .uk in particular, you need to isolate what's quality. There are quality names dropping, but I think we're in a phase where search has so supplanted type-ins that a downturn in overall registrations in the UK is inevitable. Hence maybe Nominet's keenness to diversify and re-brand in net security etc - because when it comes to domains it is a contracting market ahead, with .uk registrations in particular going over a cliff.
