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AusRegistry,
the Melbourne based
organization that
provides the
technology that powers Australia's
popular .AU ccTLD (in all of
its flavors, .com.au, net.au,
etc.) has just issued the first of
what will be a quarterly series of
reports providing the latest
information on how the extension is
performing.
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The
report – titled “Behind
the Dot, The State of the .au Domain”
– offers statistical insights that
have never before been released to
the public. The highlights are also
available in infographic
form (.pdf file). Each installment
in the series will
present updated data on .au DNS
query traffic, IPv6 adoption rates,
.au monthly create and renewal
totals, and various other
statistical trends across the
namespace. .au
Domain Administration (auDA)
will also make a contribution to
each report on the governance of the
.au namespace. Here
are some of the highlights quoted
from the first report:
.au
domains under management
The
report found there are currently 2.9
million .au domain names in
total, with a growth rate of 6%
over the past 12 months.
.au
consistently places in the top 10
of all country codes (out of a
respectable 283); no small feat
considering a population size of
only 23 million.
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Renewal
graphic from Bigstock |
Age
and renewal rates
Almost
40% of all .au domain
names have been registered for
between two to six years, a
positive sign of a maturing
namespace.
While
there is a large majority (43%)
of names under two years old,
we also found 7% have
been registered for more than
10 years.
The
report also found domain names
that are at least six years
old (having been renewed for
the 3rd or subsequent time)
are over 80% likely to
renew again.
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IPv6
and DNS queries
IPv6
requests are also increasing at a
steady rate. This quarter over 10%
of clients are using IPv6 to query
AusRegistry’s systems. This number
highlights an overall trend toward
IPv6 adoption, however the actual
number of end users are less once
infrastructure services are
accounted for.
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au
domains by State
In
the .au domain name State of
Origin, New South Wales
is the victor with just under 1
million registrations,
followed by Victoria
(785,993) and Queensland
(567,803). These results
correlate with the population
sizes of the states and
explain why Tasmania
(30,870) and the Northern
Territory (12,032)
recorded the least
registrations.
Length
of domain names
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When
it comes to domain names, size
matters.
Our
analysis of .au domains by
character length revealed
names in 10-13 character field
the most common.
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Interestingly,
38,432 .au domain names are 28
characters or more long, with four
domain names recording the maximum
length allowable at 63 characters.
The
report follows the publication of a
yearly survey
into consumer attitudes of the .au
namespace, and a 2011 Deloitte
Access Economics study
into the economic contribution of
the namespace to the Australian
economy. |
