July 23, 2015
The .AU registry is about to reach significant milestone - 3 million registered domains. The impressive tally should be reached tonight or tomorrow.
At the time of writing and according to the counter on the auDA web site, the number of .au domains registered had reached 2,999,691 names.
With Australia having a population of approximately 23.13 million (2013), this means around one name per 8 Australians - one of the highest resident-registered per capita rates among all the ccTLDs (country code Top Level Domains).
It's quite an achievement given the stringent criteria associated with registering most .AU names; but it's also those restrictions that have helped .AU to attain and keep a high level of credibility and trust among consumers, and make .AU such a desired extension for merchants and organisations. A 2014 survey found two-thirds of respondents were more likely to trust a .au website compared with one-third for a .com.
The .AU extension consistently ranks among the world's top ten ccTLD's in terms of number of registrations. Verisign's latest Domain Name Industry Brief ranks the .au registry at no.9.
The .AU extension has been around for a very long time - nearly three decades -but even by 2002 the registry was only 270,000 strong due to some rather intense and lengthy growing pains.
In the last 13 years however, the registry has evolved into a robust entity and the number of .AU names has multiplied by more than eleven times the 2002 level.
Last month, 51,278 names were registered and 78,285 were renewed; the latter up on June last year. In June 2015, there were 47 fully accredited .au registrars operating; the same number as June 2014.
Do you AU? Here's to the next 3 million .au domains.
Learn more about the history of .AU names
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AUSTRALIAN OWNED AND OPERATED SINCE 1996
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