Optimism is the Name of the Domain Game

All's in an (online) name. Despite individuals and companies increasingly realising the maxim and madly rushing to establish an online presence, domain name registrations have seen a slump in the first quarter this fiscal. However, there is still hope for registrars.

A recent survey by Britain-based Netcraft says there were only just over one million new domains registered in the first quarter, in comparison with over 4 million during the first quarter of 2000.

The Netcraft Web Server Survey says "the rate of growth of Websites has shown a dramatic decline, reflecting the reduction in new domain name registrations now that the dot-com bubble has burst, and perhaps the difficulty in finding good new names."

The last quarter has seen the survey size grow by just over one million, or 3.9 per cent, compared to over 4 million (44 per cent) during the same three months last year, and just under one million (24 per cent) during those months in 1999, it says.

India's leading domain registration company Net4domains, a Net4India company, says it has witnessed a slump in registrations. Net4domains, which holds 55 per cent market share, has said the US economic slowdown has impacted their growth.

"We were expecting the market to grow by about 100 per cent this year. Our registrations in the last quarter have grown by 20-25%, compared to the same period last year. The growth hasn't stopped, but what has clearly stopped is the mad rush. Individual registrations have slowed down. The major registrations are coming from the corporates who want to protect their brand names and intellectual properties on the Web," Mr Uday Sodhi, COO of Net4India, told ET.

In India, domain name registrations doubled to 200,000 in 2000 from 90,000 in 1999, which was it had jumped by four times from around 25,000 in 1998. The domestic domain name market is estimated at half a million consumers or Rs 20 crore by the end of 2001.

However, domain registrars are bullish on the Indian scenario. In fact, Network Solutions, a Verisign company, has just opened up multilingual domain name registrations in 26 Indian languages, as part of the VeriSign Global Registry Services.

Individuals and companies can now register non-English language character names, in Hindi, Oriya, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Assamese, Garhwali, and a host of Hindi dialects as well.

The Indian languages are part of the new multilingual offering of 180 languages from around the world, taking up the total number of languages to more than 350.

Net4Domains is also optimistic about future growth. "With our new ccTLDs and our latest offering -- ability to register Internet key words, we expect to further grow. Our focus will primarily be on the corporates," Mr Sodhi said.

DirectIhosting says it's domain hosting facilities business is "doing good because we cater to a large market of over 40 countries."

"We are within 2 months time of starting our own registration, we have been accredited by ICCAN and are looking forward to launching that service within 2 months, said Mr Anish G. Acharya, sales and marketing.

The Netcraft survey too predicts better times ahead for registrars. It says the revenues of the registrars should increase later this year as domains (currently .com, .net and .org, besides country specific domains such as .in for India) which were registered during the boom will expire and have to be re-registered.

There should also be further income from registration of the seven new top level domains -- .biz, .info, .name, .pro, .aero, .coop, and .museum -- approved by ICANN in November last year and expected to be functional sometime in the second or third quarter this year.