The State of .INFO from Afilias

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Afilias, provider of Internet infrastructure services and registry for the .INFO domain, released its 2009 .INFO Annual Report. The .INFO TLD has had a tough run the past several years, but things are most definitely looking up.

.INFO Ranks seventh among all 270+ top level domains worldwide, boasting over 5.3 million domains – 70% of which resolve to real content (although there are only 1 million unique websites).

The top regions for registrations continue to be North America (61 percent) and Europe (23 percent). However, Asian markets are growing and the region now holds 11 percent of .INFO registrations. .INFO also continues to gain penetration into the registrar marketplace which offers domain names for retail sale. .INFO is now available with over 330 distributors that support over 90% of sales volume in the worldwide domain name industry.

“After 8 years of concerted effort, .INFO is the undisputed most successful new TLD launched to date, accounting for over 40 percent of all new TLD registrations,” said Roland LaPlante, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Afilias “.INFO’s experience provides many lessons applicable to the launch of new domains to come. As an organization, Afilias has been able to use our experiences with .INFO as a benchmark for successfully gaining approval for, launching and growing more new TLDs than any other registry services provider.”

Voting Open for .INFO Awards

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:09:00 GMT

Afilias, the registry operator for the .Info domain extension, formally opened the 2009 .INFO Awards to public voting today.

Anyone can now vote for their favorite of the top 10 .INFO Web sites until midnight on November 6, 2009. Prizes for the awards are allocated as: US$7,500 for the winner, US$5,000 for second place, and US$3,000 for third place. The winners of the .INFO Awards will be announced on November 9.

Some interesting statistics on this year's awards:

- The most popular categories for site submissions included special interest websites (28 percent), private websites (23 percent) and business/corporate websites (17 percent).

- Interest in the .INFO awards was truly global with submissions being entered from 18 countries. Germany led with 31 percent of submissions, followed by the United States at 19 percent and Russia at 12 percent. Notably, the UK accounted for 6 percent of submissions, while India and France each had 4 percent.

“The .INFO domain is the global home for anyone with information to share. The submissions for this year’s awards program reflect .INFO’s global appeal and the inherent usefulness of an Internet domain entirely devoted to information,” said Roland LaPlante, senior vice vresident and chief marketing officer for Afilias.

I was honored to be a member of the judges panel this year, along with Dominik Grollman, editor in chief of Internet World Business (Germany), Gautam Chatur, senior director at Qorvis Communications, Michael Stephanblome, managing director at AdJug UK, Katy Tafoya, Editor of ConstantChatter.com, and Philipp Grabensee, chairman of the Afilias Board of Directors.

What are you waiting for? Go ahead and vote for your favorite .INFO award now!

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'Net Features : affilias

The State of .INFO from Afilias

Voting Open for .INFO Awards