I’ve just gotten back from a two-week motorhome tour of New Zealand’s south island. Yes, it was tough work!
As a domain investor, I couldn’t help but notice only a few businesses were using a Direct “.nz” domain for their business website, in fact, I was only able to see 4 businesses in the wild, throughout my entire 2 weeks driving around the country.
Here are the 4 businesses I saw out in the wild, and believe me I was looking every day…
So what does this say about the future of Direct “.au” domain names Australia?
Well, let’s look at the launch and data of what happened in New Zealand…
Direct “.nz” was launched in September 2014. Over the next 5 years, this is how the Direct “.nz” registrations went…
Meanwhile, this next graph is how the existing “.co.nz” registrations went…
What can we draw from this data?
Well, if Direct “.nz” was launched in late 2014, we can see that it only grew from 100,000 registrations to just 140,000 registrations 5 years later. And I only saw FOUR businesses out in the wild during a two-week road trip.
Perhaps this means that all the other 139,996 Direct “.nz” registrations are merely brand protecting their matching “.co.nz” domain?
And let’s not forget there are just over 500,000 “.co.nz” domains registered. This means, five years after the launch of Direct “.nz”, it appears only 28% of people are “brand protecting” their “.co.nz” domain name.
To me, this means that 64% of New Zealand businesses, who own their “.co.nz” domain name, don’t give two-shits about owning their Direct “.nz” matching domain.
Let us know your thoughts below, or on our Linked In post.
auDA was made aware of this long before they proceeded with .au Direct. Canada and UK are other countries that were studied. There was a false start in 2018 (or was it 2019). Direct .au has been kicked around for years and always shut down. But .au Direct was not about helping the Australian public. It was about money. It is a simple matter to follow the money to see who benefits. Who got the bonuses? Who’s CV has a check mark?
The Direct .NZ businesses I mentioned above, ensured they own their Direct .NZ too…. and .NZ has been around for about 5 years. So the whole point of these Direct .AU and Direct .NZ’s seem to be for the governing bodies and Registrars to receive DOUBLE INCOME for the same domain. auDA would have seen these numbers of .NZ before releasing Direct .AU but they did it anyway.
Agreed. It was only ever about money for the auDA. I noticed they did a great job of getting the media on board when .au Direct was released. There were a bunch of articles scaring people into the fact that they could lose their name forever, or worse still someone else might pose as them if they didn’t reg their corresponding .au Direct domain. I expected at the time that there would be reasonable uptake, but that the vast majority would be dropped a year later. Long-term, I think there will be a small percentage of .au domains held onto for brand projection and an even smaller percentage that get used (and those will just be because they’re a 3L or short dictionary word that is already gone in other extensions).
At least the number of .nz direct domains that are reg’d has increased over time. That’s not going to be the case with .au direct. Certainly not for the first couple of years anyway.
Google.nz does not resolve
Google.uk does not resolve
Google.au does not resolve
Nuff said
These extensions are turds on a stick hold the stick