The .Sydney geographic domain name extension turned one today. To date, over 9,000 .Sydney domain names have been registered, and according to nTLDStats.com, there are over 8,200 active .Sydney domain names in the zonefile. The City of Sydney Australia operates the WhatsOn.Sydney website, and there are restaurants, hotels, and other local businesses that use other .Sydney domain names.
According to a press release marking the first anniversary, “Sydneysiders can enjoy special birthday offers for a limited time courtesy of domain name retailers Crazy Domains, Melbourne IT and Netregistry.” People interested in seeing the special offers can visit Get.Sydney to register .Sydney domain names.
In celebration of the one year anniversary of .Sydney, I was sent some of the following facts and figures about .Sydney domain names. I would have preferred that the registry send me to .Sydney to see the extension in action, but for now, we can check this out:
- 97% of all .sydney domain names are registered by Australians, with 77% of these registered to individuals and businesses located in New South Wales.
- The most visited .sydney domain names as ranked by Alexa (a website traffic monitoring tool) include: www.barangaroo.sydney, www.fieldday.sydney and www.agentfinder.sydney.
- 46% of all .sydney domain names are between eight and 13 characters long.
- There is high availability of short and memorable .sydney domain names, with 98% of all possible three- and four-character domain names unregistered.
- The largest portfolio holder has registered 115 .sydney domain names.
- Neustar processes on average 29 million Domain Name System (DNS) queries per month for .sydney domain names, which offers an insight into the amount of website traffic generated by these domains. This averages to approximately 900,000 queries per day.
- The 10 suburbs with the most .sydney domain name registrants are (in order): Sydney, Parramatta, Surry Hills, Balmain, North Sydney, Dee Why, Alexandria, Baulkham Hills, McMahons Point and Paddington.
I find the statistic shared below incredibly odd, almost unreal. I’m not saying it isn’t true – just that I can’t imagine why (with only 9000 total reg’s over the course of a year) that a tld would receive 29 million queries a month.
“Neustar processes on average 29 million Domain Name System (DNS) queries per month for .sydney domain names, which offers an insight into the amount of website traffic generated by these domains. This averages to approximately 900,000 queries per day.”
M. Menius – that is about in line with how many DNS lookups I see a day on .com domain names. Most of this is bots. And even more are MX record lookups which I believe are mostly due to spammers. I do not believe that DNS queries per month is directly translated to traffic on a website. Though there is usually a correlation.