February 27, 2020
auDA, the administrator for Australia's country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), recently released .au registry statistics for the month of January 2020.
According to the update, 38,978 new domains were registered last month, quite a jump on December (32,717). However, January's figure was significantly down on January last year (-3%).
At the end of last month, a total of 3,172,057 Australian domains were under management, just a tad more than in January last year (3,171,919).
While growth has been nothing to write home about, some extensions have fared better than others. For example, the number of .com.au domains under management at the end of January was 2,830,330 - up 0.6% on January last year - or 16,859 names.
An extension that continues to lose ground at a rapid rate is .net.au, which again decreased from 248,274 names under management in January 2019 to 230,708 at the end of last month - a drop of 7.1%.
The .org.au extension gained a bit of ground - up 1.8% year over year. Both .asn.au and .id.au saw minor losses; -0.9% and -0.3% respectively. ASN names can be registered by non-commercial organisations located in Australia, while ID domains are for personal use by Australian residents and citizens; for example, for hobby websites.
What we're seeing in Australia is a mature market - .au has now been around for more than thirty years (you can find a short history of .au here). Even without any significant growth in the number of names under management, it still works out to one .au domain for every woman, man and child in this country.
More from the Registry Monthly Statistics report for January can be viewed here.
The results for this month will be interesting, and not just purely from a numbers point of view. In January, auDA announced it will be donating $1 from every new .au domain name registered to the Foundation for Regional and Rural Renewal (FRRR) for its bushfire relief efforts.
Based on January's performance, that could mean a donation of close to $40,000 will be on its way to FRRR soon, which will no doubt be greatly appreciated and put to good use.
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