Article Source Todd R. Weiss 19/11/2002

New .info domain name proves popular

Fourteen months after .info Top Level Domain (TLD) names became available on the Internet, the millionth .info Web site was signed up last week, making it now the sixth largest domain online.

Afilias Ltd., which maintains the registry for .info names under a contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), will tomorrow announce that the millionth .info Web site name was registered to www.los-angeles-real-estate-search.info by registrar Go Daddy Software Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz., on Nov. 13.

Roland LaPlante, chief marketing officer at Afilias, which is headquartered in Dublin, and has a U.S. office in Newtown, Pa., said the registrations have grown steadily since the company began accepting applications on Sept. 12, 2001.

The .info domain is being used by a wide range of organizations and businesses that had been locked out of many desired domain names in the already crowded .com domain, he said.

"If you try to get your business name in a .com name, it's really difficult," LaPlante said. "This is the global home of information on the Internet. It's not just about selling stuff. That's why it's had such broad appeal."

About 265,000, or 27 percent, of the 1 million registered .info sites are now online and available to Web visitors, he said, compared to about 35 percent of .com names in active use, according to Afilias.

The new .info names trail only .com, .net, .org, .de (German country code) and .uk (England country code) domains in the number of registered Web sites, he said.

.Info was one of seven new TLDs announced in May 2001 by ICANN to relieve congestion in the TLD space historically dominated by .com.

.INFO Domain Crosses 4 Million Registrations

.INFO now supports over 1 million dedicated Web sites after passing 5 year anniversary

DUBLIN, IRELAND – 20 March 2007 – Afilias, a global provider of Internet domain name registry services, announced today that the .INFO generic top-level domain has reached over 4 million domain names under management, marking a significant milestone just months after crossing its fifth anniversary of real time registrations available to the public. The four millionth name, leger-europe2007.info, was registered in the United Kingdom by the registrar MelbourneIT.

“Afilias has built the most successful brand of the new top-level domains in .INFO and has provided an attractive and popular alternative to .com and other generic TLDs,” said Roland LaPlante, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Afilias. “.INFO continues to be an Internet address that individuals and businesses choose to showcase their information on the Web. It is gaining popularity worldwide, increasing overall sales volume and even establishing itself as an emerging domain in the aftermarket and pay-per-click (PPC) markets.”

To support this milestone, Afilias has issued a 4 Million Milestone analysis report that details updated insight on the .INFO domain. Key highlights include:

• North America is the top market for .INFO domain sales (51 percent) with Europe in second place (38 percent).
• The US is the top country for .INFO registrations (48 percent) followed by Germany (11 percent).
• .INFO is now available for sale through 183 registrars, or domain name retailers, worldwide, which represent the vast majority of the domain business.
• 74 percent of .INFO sites are active, including over 1 million dedicated sites.
• The highest aftermarket sale on record for .INFO was NewYork.info which sold for over US$46,000 in September 2006. Both the number and value and the value of .INFO?s in the aftermarket are growing.

.INFO is now the #6 largest domain on the Internet, and has enabled millions of registrants to get their preferred name in a domain that enjoys broad acceptance on a global scale.

About .INFO

.INFO was the first generic, unrestricted TLD to be launched since .com. Registrations in .INFO first became available in 2001. Since then, .INFO has grown to become the sixth largest TLD in the world with over 4 million registrations. 74 percent of .INFO registrations are being used on the Web either for a wide variety of purposes including dedicated sites, businesses, blogs, etc. .INFO currently contains over two million active sites and over 1 million dedicated Web sites. .INFO is also available in nine Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) scripts including German (DE), Polish (PL), Swedish (SV), Danish (DA), Hungarian (HU), Icelandic (IS), Latvian (LV), Lithuanian (LT), and Korean (KO).