Is auDA’s new marketing windfall working?
Australian ccTLD .au appears to be growing at a faster rate after registry auDA cut its wholesale prices and devoted millions of dollars to marketing.
While the numbers are by no means conclusive, in the three months after the new business model came into effect .au grew almost twice as much as in the comparable year-ago period.
At the end of June, auDA switch its back-end registry from Neustar to Afilias.
It cut its wholesale price by 10% and said it would invest AUD 8 million ($5.7 million) over four years into a marketing and innovation fund.
The fund offers financial incentives to registrars and resellers that promote .au domains.
Growing .au’s market share is one of the defined objectives of the program, and stats collected by DI show it might be working.
In the three months between June 28 (two days before the transition to Afilias) and September 28, the number of reported .au domains went up from 3,153,432 to 3,163,998, an increase of 10,566 domains.
In the immediately prior three months, registered domains actually declined by 1,150.
In the same period June-September period of 2017, domains were up by 5,734, about half the level of this year.
So is the new regime succeeding in growing numbers more rapidly? Maybe. It’s probably too early to tell for sure.
Any increase in DUM could be offset by declines from domain investors, if a proposed policy change about who is allowed to register domains comes into effect.
The numbers above have two caveats: 1) they’re based on the running total published more or less live on auDA’s web site, so should be considered ball-park as they may have been collected at different times during the day, and 2) it’s possible that Afilias and Neustar report numbers from their back-ends differently, which might mean comparisons of numbers reported before and after the transition are unfair.
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