.bayern starts GA with almost 20,000 names
Bayern Connect took its .bayern new gTLD into general availability yesterday and secured close to 20,000 registrations.
This morning’s zone file count shows that at least 19,121 domains were registered during .bayern’s combined sunrise/landrush period, which ended a few weeks ago.
GA kicked off at 1300 local time yesterday.
There are no local presence requirements to register names, according to the registry’s web site.
Bayern in the German word for Bavaria, Germany’s second most-populous state. It has 12.5 million inhabitants, 1.5 million of whom live in its capital, Munich.
It’s the third most-successful geographic gTLD launch of the current round, after .london’s 35,000 names and .berlin’s 33,000.
On a per-head basis, however, the numbers don’t look so good.
While .koeln, the gTLD for the city of Cologne, had one registered domain for every 79 inhabitants at the end of its first GA day, .bayern has one domain per 663 people. The numbers for .berlin and .london were 106 and 240 respectively.
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Just a few comments:
– GA was at 10:00 UTC = 12:00 local. Minor detail. 🙂
– Around 7,000 .bayern domains were registered by InternetX on behalf of the local Bavarian government on the morning of the 30th, i.e. during Sunrise.
– Comparing “regional TLDs” with “city TLDs” is a bit like comparing apples and pears. Compared to .scot or .ruhr (the two other “regional” TLDs), I would say .bayern did quite well.
Unfortunately, .scot are currently withholding zone file access for no good reason, so there are no apples to compare to.
Keep in mind that many of the first day .berlin registrations were freebies from 1&1.
Kevin,
just a short correction: .berlin made the most successful launch with nearly 32,000 domains on the first day while .london collected the 35,000 names over several weeks.
Dirk
What you say may be true, but I was comparing the end-of-first-GA-day numbers. Pre-registrations, sunrise and landrush all count towards this, as do free domains.
Dirk,
How many of those are paid for? How many of your current registrations is your registry receiving income for? From what I hear you have about 90,000 free registrations…including 70,000 that were given away over a highly “successful” give away. But am happy to be wrong about all of that.
fyi – we started with our promotion as a thank you for 50,000 payed domain names 🙂
Of course, Dirk is technically right: The .berlin domains that 1&1 gave away for free to customers were paid ones from the registry’s perspective – 1&1 paid for them.
As far as the June promotion is concerned, let’s all be honest to ourselves: There were around 60,000 registrations mainly going to two domain speculators. The fact that the .berlin registry pulled the plug on this promotion before it was supposed to end, is a clear sign that this kind of abuse was an ugly surprise.
Despite all of this, .berlin is still one of the best performing Geo TLDs.