July 2016 - .in Domain Market Blog

Analysis of Registered .IN Domains — Part – 3

In the third and final post of the series, I would be looking at few mixed-bag kind of things here. The first part can be found here and the second part here.

Hyphens:

Hyphens are the only special character allowed in the names are used to delimit words. So, there are not many names with hyphens there. Just about 31K .IN names which come to about 2.4% of the names. Obviously, they are not popular.

Numbers:

There are about 76K .in names with numbers in them and about 36K of them contains only numbers. The breakup of these (names that contain only numbers) by length are shown in the table below. As evident there is a buyout of NNN.IN and NNNN.IN domains. There are also about 20% of available NNNNN.INs also registered.

Length of Numeric Domains	Number of Numerical Domains
5	21,761
4	10,000
6	3,068
3	1,000
7	91
8	58
10	37
9	14
11	8
12	2
13	1
14	1
15	1
63	1

Owners:

To determine the .in domain holders with the largest portfolios, I’m assuming that email as a proxy for the owner. I understand that a registrant can use different email addresses, but trying to figure out the various emails used by a registrant is a useless exercise, so let’s go with the notion of an email for a registrant. Based on that here are the top registrants of .in domains:

Email Address	Number of .IN Domains
k******031@qq.com	39,333
5*****681@qq.com	15,152
w******ent@west263.com	14,770
1*****968@qq.com	13,392
r****255@qq.com	9,828
w****yil@126.com	9,411
q**@111.co	5,455
d****@treadall.com	4,831
j****325@163.com	4,443
s************ula@gmail.com	4,389

The email addresses are hidden to protect the privacy of the users. But, based on the email address provider, 8 out of the top 10 .in portfolio owners are Chinese. It is a surprising that the largest portfolio owners are NOT Indian, but rather our neighbours. It seems that the keen Chinese investors are trying to acquire the good .in domains, because eventually .IN will explode.

There are ~544K unique email addresses associated with owners of .IN domains. Which means on average a registrant owns about 2.3 .IN names.

This concludes my evaluation/study of 1.28M .in domains. Hope you liked it, and if you have suggestion or feedback, please let me know.

NEW Ad Campaign to Promote .IN Extension Planned

In the past week, there was an important news that broke out about the registry planning to launch a massive ad campaign to promote .in extension. So what does this mean and what could we expect? Here is my attempt to summarize what the news is and describe some background information as well.

1. The .IN registry which falls under NIXI and this, in turn, falls under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEIT). The MEIT is headed by our honorable minister Mr. Ravi Shankar Prasad. Below is the org chart, there is a Secretary to the ministry and under the Secretary, there are a group of Joint Secretaries (JCs). NIXI group is headed by JC Mr. Rajiv Bansal and is designated as the CEO of NIXI. The announcement about the new ad campaign was made by him.

2. Based on the initiatives like Make in India, Digital India, and Start-up India which have taken off on a right and positive track, promotion of >IN make piggyback on their momentum and also provide a necessary service for launching their online presence.

3. Another point that the ad campaign wants to drive is to bring a nationalist flavour of owning the .in domain.

4. To promote registering on domains in the native language, the IDN .bharat will also be encouraged. I think, there is a place for .bharat NOW rather than later. Most of India do not use English as a first language and .bharat will facilitate rural India to get online. Imagine the power of this? Mind-blowing, to say the least. Even 1-2 pages by a local rural entity will go a long way. I’ll leave the reason why India is called Bharat for another day.

5. NIXI did run a few ad campaigns in 2012 as seen below. Would be interesting to see how its done and what the theme is. IMHO, the registry has a few options:

a. Make a funny ad,
b. Make an informative ad with/without humour,
c. Make a provocative ad akin to what GoDaddy does. Although this would appeal to metros more than other places.

6. NIXI also has ran few social campaigns this year, I covered them here.

SOURCE: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/it-ministry-plans-ad-campaign-to-promote-in-domain-name/articleshow/53407362.cms

List of Available LLLL.INs as of July-27th, 2016

Here is the list of all available LLLL.INs as of the scan done on July 27th, 2016.

Here are the stats:

Available: 245,186

CVCV Names Available: 0

VCVC Names Available: 7,904

AAAB Names Available: 0

ABBB Names Available: 0

ABAB Names Available: 0

AABB Names Available: 0

ABBA Names Available: 50

CHIPs Names Available: 526

The trend graph is:

Analysis of Registered .IN Domains — Part – 2

This is the second post of the series about analyzing about 1.28M .in names. The introductory post can be found here. In this post, I’ll present stats about the domain age and then see the top registrars of .in names. Before I begin let me iterate that the 1.28M names aren’t a comprehensive list of .in domains, but about 75% of the total number of .in names as reported by the registry.

Domain Age and Year of Registration:

The date .IN domain became available to register to the public was 16-Feb-2005. Before this .in names were available to companies and mostly telecom and network related firms. Below is the breakdown of the age of a .in domain in years and the number of domains. Note that age is relative to July 23rd, 2016. As you see the below, most of the names have been recently registered.

Also, see below for the breakdown of “year of registration” and the number of domains registered in that year. This is NOT historical data or snapshot data for that year. What is shown below is on July 23rd, 2016, what domains that are already registered and whichever year those names were registered. This does not account for any names registered in a year but dropped. From the graph, it seems that 2016 is lower than 2015, but that is because we are good 5 months away from the end of the year. I would expect that number to climb in next 3 months.

Registrars:
According to this registry page, there are about 112 accredited registrars. The list includes all the major and common registrars. It also includes some India based ones like Mitsu, Suryanandan.net, Bruwink etc. Lets look at the top 15 registrars:

Obviously, GoDaddy leads the roost and should come as no surprise. My personal favorite Dynadot is up there as well in the list. The fourth in the list is actually a China based registrar. If you followed the first post, you would see why this registrar makes the list.

Analysis of Registered .IN Domains — Part – 1

The Indian Registry as of July 23rd, reports that there are about 2.12M IN domain names registered. This consists of .in, co.in, org.in, net.in, ind.in, firm.in, gen.in. In this post series, we analyzed about 1.28M .in names to generate various interesting statistics. I understand this is not the whole list and based on the proportion of .in extension with other 3rd level in extensions, and the 1.28M names we have had hand could be short by about 300K-350K names, so in essence, we have about 75% of the .in names to work with. I’ll split the analysis into multiple posts. In the first post, I’ll look at the lengths of registered names and analyze the registrant’s country.

Lengths:

You will be surprised to know that the average length of .in domain names is actually high. It is about 9.3 and the median in 9. Below graph shows the domain lengths and the count for the top 15 lengths.

There are three names with 63 characters:

239bbb3d7d864ccc7a3fb5e2d3ab23f061e19a45444ddca883961ce252d9454.in
888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888.in
recruitment-results-notification-admitcardonlineapplicationform.in

Other long names with 50 characters or more are:

aashutoshcharitabletrustofeducationalandmedicalsciences.in
i-wont-say-i-love-u-i-will-just-make-you-feel-i-do.in
laboratory-and-scientific-equipments-manufacturers.in
laboratory-and-scientific-instruments-manufacturers.in
relax-detox-rejuvenate-heal-lifestyle-health-fitness-beauty.in
scientific-and-laboratory-equipments-manufacturers.in
scientific-and-laboratory-instruments-manufacturers.in

There are about 23K names with three characters. As you know all 3Ls, 3Ns are long gone, and they account for about 18.5K names. The other three character names include the combination of letters, numbers, and hyphen.

Countries:

The .in registrants are spread across a whopping 228 countries and territories based on the who-is information on the domains. The two letter country code in the who-is follows the ISO 3166 codes.

Here are the top 15 countries:

No surprise that the number of registrants of .IN domains are from India, but Chinese domain owners come in second. It is safe to assume that the Chinese .in domain holders are mostly domainers. We should revisit this piece of stats next year if the registered names are dropped or renewed. After the top three countries, there is a sharp decline in the number of registrant’s countries and there is a long tail. You can download the full list here (tab-delimited).