21 days ago auDA (au Domain Administration) launched .au Direct domain names in Australia for the first time.
Many Australian businesses and domain investors have warned over the years that introducing .au Direct domain names would be unnecessary and could end up being a waste of time and bring confusion to Australian website and email addresses.
However, last month, auDA decided to push ahead with implementing .au Direct anyway.
Today, auDA’s CEO Rosemary Sinclair publicly released a “CEO Update” via email that stated there have been 100,000 .au Direct domain names registered.
This means that out of the roughly 3 million “.com.au” and “.net.au” domain names, so far only around 3% of people have chosen to register their .au Direct domain.
But does this mean .au Direct has been a complete failure? Only time will tell, but if the .uk Direct launch, spike, and dramatic downturn is any indication, we have a lot more pain to get through before all becomes clear.
In a possible taste of what’s to come for .au Direct in Australia, let’s now take a look at the data for how the .uk Direct domain name extension initially launched, then bombed over the coming years.
.uk Direct was launched in the United Kingdom in June 2014. In the first month it launched, according to Nominet, they had 96,696 registrations, which is around the same amount of .au Direct that are registered now in around the same time frame.
The .uk Direct then peaked 5 years later in 2019 at 3,687,816.
Then .uk Direct slowly bled out with around a 60% drop in registrations over the next two years as at March 2022.
Only time will tell if .au Direct will follow the same fate as .uk Direct.
Don’t forget about the tens of thousands of Australian websites that went down for hours a few days before the launch – https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/22/australia-internet-outage-15000-major-news-and-government-websites-affected-by-au-error
The confusion factor has forced me to register x2 .au names to date, and more domain names in the coming months just so others not squat/use my name and stop the public from accessing the wrong address. Let’s hope that direct .au will truly benefit the other Australian citizens/residents who wish to start a presence without the need for ABN.
auDA is full of spin. Nothing has changed there. auDA does not care. They want the $$$
How is the verifications of the direct .au registrants personal drivers licence or Australian passport going? Are Registrars even doing it?
GoDaddy, Crazy Domains and others are all overseas based companies with their overseas based staff now seeing Australian direct .au domain name applicant and registrant personal registrant info live real passport and drivers license images.. what a bloody risk for all of those registrants to know somone in Ukraine, Philippines etc on $20 a day can see all of this info for the first time and take photos, download it or worse!
GoDaddy Crazy Domains Onlydomains etc all store the Australian customers and now this applicant and registrant personal drivers license ID and Australian Passport ID overseas! RISK!
“Millions of GoDaddy customer data compromised in breach”
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/hacking-2/2021/11/millions-of-godaddy-customer-data-compromised-in-breach/
“Global web hosting company GoDaddy reports data breach”
https://www.crn.com.au/news/global-web-hosting-company-godaddy-reports-data-breach-573042
The Register followed Nominet and the UK saga very well.
direct .uk was also 100%FREE for the first 2 years
.sg was FREE for businesses and free with .co.sg to try and pump up fake registration numbers
A disaster.
Click each link for the stories and learn The Register https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/31/uk_address_bulgarians/
.nz direct names are near worthless.
.uk direct names rarely sell for much and most are now registered just to park, PPC Monetise and try to resell.
Very few direct .uk or direct .nz show up in Google search results and rarely if ever in the top first page results.
Prediction: the butterfly in this picture is gobbled up by a crow and dies. Just like .au Direct will. Big question, who’s the crow in this scenario?
im so over this shit. now i have to pay double for my good names just so some slimy bugger doesnt grab my au. auda promised it would be for new businesses so they could get some good keyword domains but all the good ones are going right to the old school investers and existing companies anyway. nice cash grab auda. pat pat on back.
No you don’t. let others register the .au, and you will find out who really wants your .com.au. You will also get perhaps 50% of their traffic. What a win!
I would argue it was a failure before it started. AUDA needed to protect .com.au (no other way .au could have been introduced) but doing so with the priority system that was released means .au was dead in its tracks before the launch date.
If anyone still thinks .au has any future ask yourself this question. If you were launching a business today, would you do so with an .au if you did not own the .com.au? I think the resounding answer to that question is NO BLOODY WAY because you are going to leak traffic to the .com.au and confuse your customers!
I also see a lot of people pointing to the experience of the .uk and .nz extension. Worth remembering that the Australian public has the benefit of those observations and hence I would expect .au to do worse (Australian consumers will not be as readily sold a story that has obviously failed so drastically in other commonwealth/similar markets).
Sadly short term corporate motivations saw this new .au extension introduced. The irony is long term the Australian extension is going to lose because this extra confusion just plays into the hands of .com for big businesses in Australia that want to rise above the noise. A perfect example of this was MyDeal (ASX listed ticker MYD). The company operates under the website mydeal.com.au (it does not even own the .com), but when it came time to launch a new experience business last month, what did it launch with? A .com website using amazed.com. This is a practice we are seeing more and more of from real industry players.
So in summary the losers here are .au and sadly .com.au as well, given the overall confusion/dilution of the Australian namespace will impair the long term value of all extensions in the space. Even Australian registers (who behind the scenes lobbied so hard to make .au happen) will not win long term, as power goes offshore to the global extensions. So congratulations to .com you are the ONLY winner out of all this, long live the King!
You make some very good points here Sydney. Many are questioning the reasons auDA pushed so hard for .au Direct to be implemented.
Perhaps time will show that auDA have now watered down .com.au so much, that this possibly becomes the seminal moment when Australian businesses choose other extensions and .com instead, going forward…
no, .com.au is the winner here and even .net.au will win from .au.
when the new TLDs were launched eg. .guru, .xyz, .global, the .com names tripled in value. this is fact. review the public sales at Namebio.com and you will see that .com names that previously went for $50-60k on average have been in recent years been selling for $150-180k on average.
.net.au will still benefit from .au, because it is trusted and recognised. each .net.au registrant must have an ABN. Google gives preference to an extension based on its registrant base, and .net.au sites are on the whole legitimate Australian businesses, usually SMEs. Whereas .au is open slather to individuals and non-commercial sites and does not have an ABN requirement, which will encourage use by spammers and fraudsters, the .net.au like the .com.au will remain trusted.
.au will pretty much be a tad above .id.au. people would be mad to launch a .au site without the .com.au. And if they had the .com.au, there is no benefit and only detriment to using the unrecognised .au extension. Unrecognised both by Google and by consumers.
my 2 cents
This is an important read – https://goldsteinreport.com/calls-for-resignations-auda-afilias-failures/