.tel Enters Junk Dump Phase
The .tel sTLD launched last year and it has done well to grow to approximately 255,939 active .tel domains as of 01 April 2010. The .tel domains that have not been set up do not appear in the .tel zone file. The figure on the .tel anniversary page claims 280,000 .tel domains have been registered. In domainer terms, the .tel sTLD is something of a curiosity in that all the domains are hosted on Telnic’s own nameservers. It is, in some respects a very advanced and very successful Pay For Inclusion webdirectory.
The Landrush anniversary for any new TLD results in many of the highly speculative registrations that could not have been flipped, monetised or developed since being registered being dumped. The period when such highly speculative domains are dropped is often referred to as the “Junk Dump”. It is a crucial time for such new TLDs as it shows what the industry thinks of the TLD. Sometimes it is the point at which development in the TLD becomes more apparent.
The recently launched TLDs (.eu, .mobi, .asia) have all gone through this Junk Dump phase. It has been somewhat easier to track the effect on .mobi and .asia TLDs. The numbers of deleted domains tend to spike within three months of the anniversary of the start of the Landrush. This is due to the domain name life cycle. The .mobi Junk Dump differed from that of .asia’s as there was a sustained level of new domains right through the Junk Dump. The problem for .asia was that the level of new domain registrations fell away drastically after the initial boost of its Landrush. In real terms, the .asia sTLD is now performing like a small ccTLD. There is some hope though that the recent tightening of .cn ccTLD registration rules will give the .asia sTLD a slight boost.
The .tel is somewhat different to these other TLDs but the Junk Dump phase will hit it as well. The best case would be that it falls back the the early January2010 level (approximately 238K active domains). The cross TLD comparison of registered .tel domain names may give some indication as to the extent of the drop. There seems to be a high level of .tel domain names that are also present in com, net, org, biz, info,mobi and asia TLDs. The number of unique .tel domains (domains that only appear in .tel and not in the other gTLDs) may be worth watching. If the marketing for .tel has been effective, then there should be a high renewal percentage as many of those domains will be brand protection registrations.