DNS.be has announced that the 900th thousandth .be domain has gone live. So how long before they break the magic million?
Full release below:
900,000th .be domain name activated
Today 16 April 2009, saw the 900,000th .be domain name registered with DNS BE.
The 900,000th domain name is artchaud.be, owned by a Flemish artist creating lithographs and silk-screen prints for expositions. He is the lucky winner of 10 XL promotion stickers, which he can use to promote his website.
At the turn of the year, there were 860,000 domain names registered, a net growth of more than 16,7%. The 900,000th domain name being clocked already today clearly shows that the financial and economic crisis does not withhold the Belgians from registering their domain names. From all the holders of a .be website 70% is effectively situated in Belgium. Meaning that hundreds of thousands of Belgians are clearly familiar with .be domain names.
This year is the tenth anniversary of DNS BE. Its task is to manage and register all .be domain names: register who registered which domain name, control transfers, but mainly to ensure that all domain names are accessible. To put it in an easy way: it is the ‘telephone exchange’ of Belgium’s Internet services.
A short history: Professor Pierre Verbaeten of the Computer Science department of the Catholic University of Leuven started registering .be domain names in Belgium in 1989. Up to 1994, 129 names were registered. Since then, the number has risen sharply. At the request of Pierre Verbaeten, the responsibility for the registration of the domain names for .be was transferred to DNS Belgium, a non-profit association, which was established for this purpose on 2 February 1999 by ISPA, Agoria and Beltug.
.be actually hit the million mark in June 2006, but a subsequent zone file clean up took them back down to under 700k. I understand they also ran a number of 2 for 1 promotions but suffered poor renewal rates so numbers tailed off quite drastically.
Matt
They were doing some very heavy promotions a few years ago 🙂
It definitely helped raise awareness of the ccTLD
Michele
Promotions on domain names are great for awareness for the registry and the TLD, but must be linked to getting people to actually use them. Margins on domain names are so tight that a sale without hosting or other service package is just a temporary inflation of volume for the registry. Registrars need to have easy consumer friendly solutions for using the domain name. Once it’s being used in a meaningful way it’s much more likely to get renewed leading to long term growth in the TLD and of course revenue for the registrar/host.
Matt
I’ve always maintained that a TLD’s success can only be assured when the domains are actively and visibly being used.
Michele