.info Land Rush 2 Report

I researched LR2 domains this past week. Why you make ask? Well, first of all I like .info domains and also it is LR2 that got me in this industry. So it has some sentimental value.

LR2 or Land Rush 2 is the process Afilias used to redistribute inappropriately registered .INFO Sunrise names (before the September 2001 .info launch) that had been canceled as a result of Afilias’ challenge process. You can still read the news release at the Afilias website from May 2002.

Afilias released about 17000 .info domain names on July, 13nd 2002 and here are some interesting facts. Not sure how many people will be interested in these but I sure find it enjoying making this report. 10 years is an eternity in the domain industry and the internet so this might give some perspective on things to come.

Some interesting facts

Initially Afilias announced that it would release more than 17000 .info domains on LR2. Then it gave out a list of 16912 domains that were to be released. Actually 7 domains from that list are still on INACTIVE status and held by Afilias with whois indication “Sunrise Pending Reallocation”. From this initial list 12655 domains are list registered and 4257 domains are free. That is 3 to 1 ratio. Click here for the list of the 4257 available domains.

4154 of these 12665 currently registered domains don’t have a July, 13nd 2002 creation date. That either means that were registered later and were passed on the official LR2 day or it means that these were in fact registered on that day but were later dropped and recaptured. That is a staggering 32,82%.

281 of the currently registered domains are INACTIVE. They don’t have nameservers attached to them. Believe it or not there are 5 domains that have never been updated that have the original 13th of July 2012 date. These domains were registered for the maximum number of years (10) and expire today! All are owned by the same person and never had a nameserver associated with them. All 5 domains have been inactive for the past 10 years.

One other interesting fact is that 1044 or 8,25% of the 12665 domain names have they whois details hidden under privacy. I am not familiar with what the percentage is on all worldwide domain names registered so I can’t compare this.

LR2 Registrar Market Share

The 12665 domains are distributed in 178 different registrars. Some of the registrars only have a little as 1 .info domain names from LR2 registered with them. There are 37 of those!

There are 23 registrars that have 100 or more domains registered with them and their total is 10589 domains. This is a 83,67% market share. GoDaddy and its subsidiaries are leading with 15,10%. There are several German registrars in the list as .info is quite popular in German speaking countries. (127 domains is about 1%)

LR2 Most Active Registrants

There 31 registrants that own 50 or more LR2 domains. The top one has 290 domains. These 31 registrants own 18,82% of all LR2 registered domains. I only show the names of the companies on the graph. People’s names are not shown. Of course all these domain names were not necessarily acquired during the LR2 in 2002. I myself have been buying LR2 domains in expired auctions at various venues all these years.

LR2 Country Distribution

Registrants come from many countries around the world but there only 15 countries that have more than 100 registered to their citizens. The United States is leading with 29,10% but Germany and Austria are behind with 22,63% and 11,47% respectively that gives a total of 34,10%. This again comes as no surprise.

LR2 Parking Companies Market Share

Surprisingly there are not as many parked domains as I would expect. I looked for the obvious nameservers so maybe a missed some (or many) of the forwarding but this is still a surprise to me. There are only 2977 domains parked with companies with 100 domains parked with them or more. That is only 17,60%. Maybe that would be closer to 20% if I had included some of the many small parking companies represented in the LR2 domain list. Sedo is distant first with a 65% market share.

LR2 Domain Name Sales

I compiled a list of 56 .info LR2 domain sales from the past 10 years that were for $10,000 of more. That is quite good for a narrow list as LR2. In fact, the oldest sale is mine for England.info that I sold on ebay a year after LR2.

Fan fact:
Seo.info was released in the LR2 and it was dropped 2 years later. It was caught in 2004 and then sold for $21,930 in 2009.

2003 England.info $10,400
2004 Moscow.info $10,000
Tampa.info $10,000
Solarstrom.info $10,000
2005 Funds.info $22,246
Best.info $20,880
SantaClaus.info $12,307
Sudtirol.info $10,308
2006 Camping.info $28,100
New-York.info $22,864
Racing.info $18,000
Events.info $17,858
Nevada.info $13,162
Physician.info $10,500
2007 Chinese.info $37,111
Christian.info $35,000
Science.info $30,000
RingTone.info $25,625
Manhattan.info $21,000
Newspaper.info $18,409
Houston.info $17,000
Fund.info $15,000
123.info $14,000
Booking.info $11,500
Girl.info $11,000
Names.info $10,468
Ontario.info $10,000
2008 CEO.info $32,500
Hoteles.info $30,607
American.info $23,530
Printer.info $21,500
Pizza.info $20,235
Politics.info $15,250
Pay.info $15,000
Tarife.info $14,100
Flu.info $14,000
Schule.info $11,000
Seek.info $10,224
2009 Dubai.info $35,000
SEO.info $21,930
Bodybuilding.info $13,500
SexToys.info $12,849
Trading.info $10,374
Gas.info $10,293
Parents.info $10,000
2010 Geld.info $29,885
Coupons.info $17,600
Alex.info $14,500
Vacations.info $12,901
Russland.info $11,970
Versicherungsvergleich.info $10,564
2011 PlasticSurgery.info $14,805
Attorneys.info $13,000
Carpet.info $12,495
Lawyer.info $10,099
Marketing.info $10,099

These sales are for .info LR2 domain names ONLY. Year 2012 is not included.

Sold.Domains

About Konstantinos Zournas

I studied Computer Engineering and Computer Science in London, UK and I am now living in Athens, Greece. I went online in 1995, started coding in 1996 and began buying domain names and creating websites in 2000. I started the OnlineDomain.com blog in 2012.

13 comments

  1. In my experience I do not have much success with .info domain names. There are no takes for my http://www.BankAtm.info even for $50… Now Godaddy is offering .info as a gift with the purchase of .com domain names, good move by them to popuralise it…

    • You hand registered BankAtm.info on April 2012. It was available like .biz is also available because there is no buyer for such a domain.
      Theoretically only a bank could buy it but banks don’t buy this kind of domains.
      Also resellers don’t have a use for such a name. And it is kind of redundant including both bank and atm. Atm.info would have been great.

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