The Domain Name Industry closed 2009 with a base of more than 192 million domain name registrations across all of the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs), an increase of nearly 15 million domain name registrations since the close of 2008. New registrations in the fourth quarter of 2009 came in at around 3.7 million domain name registrations per month to total approximately 11 million new domain name registrations across all of the TLDs in the last quarter of 2009. This reflects an eight percent increase in new registrations from the third quarter 2009.

The overall base of .com and .net domain names grew to 96.7 million domain names at the end of 2009, a seven percent increase over the same quarter in 2008. New .com and .net registrations were added at an average of approximately 2.4 million per month in the last quarter of 2009 for a total of 7.3 million new registrations in the quarter. The renewal rate for the fourth quarter of 2009 was 71 percent which represents a slight change from the third quarter of 2009 which was approximately 70.5 percent.

Growth in the .uk register year on year was 11 per cent, so above the rate for .com and .net., to remain the 3rd largest TLD behind Germany (2nd) and China (1st).

Those findings and more are featured in the latest Domain Name Industry Brief published by VeriSign.

www.aquitainefrance.co.uk

www.bordeaux.co.uk

www.shakespeareidentity.co.uk

As usual we have used Wordpress – with the right plugins it makes life very easy and is a good way to build out content sites quickly. We’ve also made use of our in-house team of writers to roll out the sites at a cost-effective price.

Firstly they are introducing a Phishing feed service. This is designed to provide registrars with information about domain names on their account that are suspected of being involved in phishing. Nominet is working with a range of security companies who are providing them with live data feed of sites that have been reported as phishing sites. The data is then used to alert a registrar of any domain names on their tag that are on this report, who can then lock the name using our Investigation lock, whilst further checks are carried out.

Whilst a domain name has been placed under an investigation lock, this will act by removing the relevant domain name from the zone file and preventing changes from being made. This means that any web site or email associated with the domain name will no longer be available.

Nominet are to be applauded in this innovation, especially as it will bring extra credibility and trust to the UK domain register.

At present we currently have bids in for:

snowboardholiday.co.uk – Click here for details.
digitalcamerainsurance.co.uk – Click here for details.
incomeinsuranceprotection.co.uk – Click here for details.
gizmostore.co.uk – Click here for details.

We were called earlier this week by a journalist working for the The National, an English language newspaper in Dubai.  We asked to comment on the cybersquatting of the burjkhalida.com domain – the Burj Khalifa being Dubai’s recently opened world’s tallest building.

As reported in the article:

“Dubai’s surprise name-change for the world’s tallest building may have opened a million-dirham window of opportunity for savvy internet entrepreneurs.

What had been known from its inception as Burj Dubai was officially unveiled as Burj Khalifa during the inauguration ceremony on Monday night.

Dozens of people immediately flocked to the internet to attempt to buy variations of the building’s dot-com or dot-ae domain name.”

The full article and our comments are currently featured at http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100106/NATIONAL/701059815/1010

As a consequence of this action – apparently the first change to the Times Online’s blocking policy since May 2008 – two million visitors to NewsNow.co.uk every month will no longer find headlines and links to content on the Times Online site in their news search results.

NewsNow MD Struan Bartlett

According to Struan Bartlett, Managing Director and Chairman of NewsNow:  “It is lamentable that News International has chosen to request we stop linking to their content and providing in-bound traffic and potential subscribers to the Times Online and right now it looks as though NewsNow has been singled out. We note that no other major search engine has been blocked by NI in this manner. NewsNow is not fundamentally different to other news search engines that are part of the Internet infrastructure, such as Google News and Yahoo. Why block us and not them?”

The blocking has been technically implemented via the robots.txt protocol which requests search engines, web spiders and other web robots to refrain from asking for pages from all or part of a website.

Continues Bartlett: “We can understand why a website would attempt to block a search engine that was abusing its resources or blatantly stealing content. But this clearly isn’t the case with NewsNow. The freedoms to link and quote sources and compare and contrast reported views are press freedoms on which News International itself relies. Arbitrary attacks on news search engines therefore undermine press freedom, as well as the entire basis on which the Internet runs. NI is asking us to accept restrictions on our freedom to link to publicly available information that it would not accept itself.”

In December 2009, NewsNow decided to pull all links to many national newspaper websites from its subscription service following attempts by The Newspaper Licensing Agency Limited (the NLA) to impose a scheme that introduced the requirement to obtain permission and pay fees to circulate links to freely available web pages. The scheme has subsequently been referred to the Copyright Tribunal.

Although News International is not party to the scheme, it may be the first major UK media organisation to try to introduce the same requirement through selectively blocking search engines from linking to its websites. Concludes Bartlett: “The question remains whether News International, in arbitrarily blocking individual search engines, is trying to use its muscle to gain unreasonable control over the public’s freedom to choose the way they access information and news online. These are precisely some of the reasons why we and many others support The Right2Link Campaign.”

Click here for more information.

A Heart Internet reseller hosting package already offers unlimited web space and bandwidth, with the ability to host unlimited domains. By having free windows hosting available as part of the monthly fee, they have created an attractive reseller hosting package for prospective clients to sign up to.

“By offering Windows hosting for free within the monthly package, we are capitalising on an area of the market that our competitors seem to be overlooking,” commented Jonathan Brealey, Managing Director of Heart Internet. “We believe that offering Windows hosting for free should be commonplace with any reseller package as it makes up so much of the hosting market. By including it in our reseller package for free, we are still head and shoulders above our competitors, offering the best reseller hosting services within the UK.”

At XEC we have been using Heart Internet web hosting for several years, finding them reliable and responsive to any problems.  To find out more about Heart Internet’s services, visit www.heartinternet.co.uk.

So far there as been overwhelming support to the recommendations made by Nominet, with 95% of respondents of approximately 300 respondents in favour of Nominet’s proposals on each of the four consultation questions.

What do you think of our commitment to securing Nominet for the public purpose?

What do you think of our commitment to having strong Nominet governing principles?

What do you think of our commitment to ensure that Nominet pricing is fair and flexible?

What do you think of our commitment to putting membership at the heart of .uk?

It is still possible to submit your views to Nominet, you can view a pdf version of our consultation paper and email your response to shapingthefuture@nominet.org.uk.

Nominet now have the task of reviewing the responses and considering the feedback we have received.  Following this, in January, we will publish a revised version of our articles.  Following this, they will be inviting Nominet memberships to vote on these proposed new Nominet articles ahead of an EGM in February 2010.

Bigmouthmedia analysts believe that an evolving search landscape, the continued rise of social media and advances in mobile technology will combine to make the next year one of the most eventful in the sector’s history. With these and other factors blurring the boundaries between PR, marketing and customer care, the company also predicts that the shape of the search business itself will begin to change.

“Digital marketing has always been a dynamic industry, but the introduction of real time search, the continued convergence of devices and the apparently unstoppable rise of social media have all come together at the same time, and we expect this to have a major impact upon the search landscape in 2010,” said Andrew Girdwood, bigmouthmedia’s Head of Search.

“The industry has matured, and already we are seeing some of the more prehistoric SEO business models out there beginning to fail. Major clients increasingly require partners with international scale, and as the downwards pressure on costs continues, small-scale agencies are going to struggle to cope in what is likely to become an environment dominated by a handful of major players.”

Bigmouthmedia’s sector-by-sector predictions for the year ahead indicate that the digital marketing business could be facing one of the most challenging years in its history.

Retailers are expected to continue investing in social media strategies designed to monetise direct marketing channels like Twitter and Facebook while simultaneously expanding their mobile marketing activities.

In the travel business, operators seeking to offset a fall in revenues caused by the global recession will increasingly look online. Some 57% of travel marketing budgets will be spent online in 2010, while the majority of companies are also predicted to increase spend on Social Media & Online PR and Search engine optimisation as they attempt to come to terms with this evolving channel.

In the world of finance, the advent of the widely predicted new supermarket banking services look set to dominate the sector’s year. A scramble has already begun, meanwhile, to win over the significant increase in consumers expected to return online and begin shopping for services again in 2010.

“The search marketing business has weathered the economic downturn better than most, but there is no room for complacency. For every one of the opportunities these new developments bring there are technical and logistical challenges to be overcome,” said Girdwood.

2010: The Year Ahead in Digital Marketing is available for download from bigmouthmedia