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Big claims from small registrar

Kevin Murphy, March 16, 2010, 14:07:08 (UTC), Domain Registrars

You’ve got to admire the cojones on Domainmonster, an upstart registrar from the UK.
In a delightfully hyperbolic press release out today, the company reveals it is “the world’s largest new domain name supplier” and compares itself to Go Daddy.
Because I think it’s funny, I’ll post the meat of the press release before de-constructing it.

UK Company Confirmed as World’s Largest New Domain Name Supplier
LONDON, March 16, 2010 /PRNewswire/ — According to public data available at ICANN.org, the controller of Global Top Level Domain Names (gTLDs), Domainmonster.com has been confirmed as the largest domain name supplier worldwide for new generic (gTLD) domain launches in the past two years.[1,2]
Measured by the largest number of domains registered in the first month of public door opening at a domain registry, the closest retail competitor was US based Go-Daddy, some 36% behind Domainmonster.com.
“We are very excited to be highlighting this data to the general public,” commented Matt Mansell, CEO, Domainmonster.com. “It lays bare that the historic big guys are simply sitting on .com balance sheets maintained from a boom at the turn of the century. We are evolving the domain space as it exists today, winning the race. We are delighted the lawyers have let us release these statistics today to allow us to prove it,” continued Mansell.

Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?
Now, for the fine print.

[1]. Data compiled using publicly filed data located at http://www.icann.org/en/tlds/monthly-reports/ for new domain launches in 2008/2009
[2]. Based on 1 Year new domains created within first month following Go-Live/Normal Operation start date, across all gTLD domains launched in 2008/9.

So, lawyers have nothing to do with it. These claims, whatever they are, are based on the publicly available registry reports.
But what are the claims?
They relate to “all gTLD domains launched in 2008/9”. Judging from the monthly reports, that could only mean .museum and .tel. Since Domainmonster (Mesh Digital Ltd) has never been a .museum registrar, we’ll have to assume they’re talking about .tel.
They’re also talking about “1 Year new domains created within the first month following Go-Live”. For .tel, that’s March 2009. So let’s pull up the .tel report for that month (.csv).
Mesh Digital did in fact register more .tel names than any other registrar during March 2009, 13,215 in total. Its closest competitor was Key-Systems GmbH (domaindiscount24.net), with 10,561.
Go Daddy doesn’t figure in the report because it did not, and still does not, register .tel domains. Or .museums. I can’t begin to imagine where the claim of “Go-Daddy, some 36% behind Domainmonster.com” comes from.
So the claim to be “the world’s largest new domain name supplier” actually means “we sold the most .tels last March”.
Incidentally, Name.com has now overtaken Mesh, based on the latest .tel registry report, for November 2009.

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