DotTel Drops over 26K Domains
The .tel zone shrunk by 26,217 domains since 01 January 2014. The bulk of these deletions seem to have occurred in the last forty eight hours. The .tel zone count on 01 January 2014 was 213,239 domains. The current zone count is 187,022 domains. There were 1,417 new domains since 01 January 2014. This is one of the biggest drops to hit the .tel sTLD and it represents a drop of approximately 12.29% of the zone.
The DotTel sTLD is not exactly the kind of TLD that attracts domainers and it is closer in growth patterns to small ccTLDs. From a webmaster point of view, it is more of a Pay Per Inclusion web directory than a TLD. While it has some use, it really hasn’t caught the public’s imagination in terms of registration volume. Technically some of the features are interesting but for the public, it is an answer to a question that had not been asked. With the rise of smartphones, it might have expected better integration with existing websites. In terms of marketing, it needs a brand champion like Godaddy to push sales.
One of the problems with .tel is that there’s very little “upsell” opportunities apart from email and users get confused by the “walled garden” concept
Some of the new TLD applicants seem to think that they can do something similar and wall off registrants. It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out for them
I use it :-)
It should be an indication of how things will go for some of the new gTLDs. Perhaps some of the domains that dropped were speculative and the .tel is not really a domainer opportunity. The 1417 new domains since January is typical of a small managed ccTLD rather though and there may be a few more deletions before it reaches some level of stability.
Just looking at the drops and it seems that the bulk of the drops, 26,131 of them are XN– IDN drops. The non-IDN drops are 1503.
Michele you make a good point with the “walled garden,” which can be generalized to having a limited/thin secondary market.
Jean, I believe that you can generalize your gTLDs warning to failures if they are not able to motivate the creation of a thick secondary market. As the VC saying goes, “No exit, no entry.” Conversely, owners of new gTLDs should seriously take into account new gTLD signals/messages that are prone to a liquid secondary market.
Another 38,245 .tel domains dropped today. Of these 38,286 were IDNs. What seems to be happening is the bursting of an IDN bubble. Some registries add IDN registration to their TLD to grow registration volume. It works for a while but it creates a speculative bubble and within a few years, a lot of the speculative domains that could not be flipped or traded are dropped. The core non-IDN of .tel is still relatively intact. (Decreasing slightly.)
@Michele @Alex It is very much a classical walled garden and registration volume in these TLDs tends to follow small, managed ccTLD dynamics. What really drives small ccTLDs is development and TLD identification (where the registrant associates with the ccTLD being *their* TLD in the same way as their country is their country). That forces development. But there’s little to develop in .tel and as a result it has not got a very high profile. It seems that the delay between the application and ICANN acceptance also hit the TLD. As the application process was years long, other events intervened and the whole domain industry had changed. The environment in which the initial Telnic application was made was .COM dominated (circa 20M .COM domains) with ccTLDs only beginning to make inroads on the market but by the time that .tel was launched, the market had changed (more ccTLD emphasis and non-core TLDs not doing so well) and the domain market bubble (Domain Tasting creating artificial scarcity of gTLD domains) was bursting. Tie in the credit crunch and .tel was facing a perfect storm.
If new gTLD operators fail to kickstart widespread development (development drives usage which drives registrations which creates value) then they will find it very difficult to break the 100K barrier in the first year, if ever.