Can you understand auDA’s LinkedIn post today?

Today, auDA publicly posted on their LinkedIn profile, “Australia – we have reached a new domain name milestone with 3.6 million .au domain names registered!“

Many people who liked it were employed by auDA.

We had a number of people reach out to us and point out this is technically not correct, and some may even possibly view it as misleading.

auDA have been promoting ‘.au’ as “Direct Registration”. So why now just go and bundle every extension into the one brand of ‘.au’?

According to auDA’s own 2021 Q4 Report (https://www.auda.org.au/news-events-insights/reporting-new/quarterly-reports), they show the following numbers:

If we do some basic maths and add 2 percent for a further 6 months of ‘.com.au’ registrations, according to our gorilla maths, the figures start to look a little more like this:

3,130,000 .com.au

216,336 .net.au

76,000 .org.au

17,100 .edu.au

12,500 .id.au

6,500 .gov.au

3,100 .asn.au

Which means auDA’s LinkedIn post today should probably REALLY say, “Australia – we have reached a new domain name milestone with 138,464 ‘.au’ domain names registered!“

There’s a BIG difference between saying 3.6 million ‘.au’ domain names registered and somewhere around 150,000.

That’s a large gap.

Many of us are wondering what the actual numbers are for all the Australian domain name extensions?

Is it time to say that the launch of Direct .au was a complete failure yet?

*figures are rough estimates. We will gladly display auDA’s exact figures if they send them to us in the next 48 hours.