.AU Report: 2.9 Million Domains, 6% Growth, 43% Of Domains Are Under 2 Years Old

A new report on .au, the Australian ccTLD, reveals that almost 50 percent of all .au domain names are between nine and 15 characters in length, while New South Wales claims the honour of the state with the largest number of .au registrations, according to a new report published by AusRegistry today.

The report – titled “Behind the Dot, The State of the .au Domain” – is part of a new quarterly series which provides an analysis on the performance of the .au domain namespace and offers statistical insights that have never before been released to the public.

The series will capture data on .au DNS query traffic, IPv6 adoption rates, .au monthly create and renewal totals, and various other statistical trends across the namespace. .au Domain Administration (auDA) will also make a contribution to each report on the governance of the .au namespace.

.au domains under management

The report found there are currently 2.9 million .au domain names in total, with a growth rate of six percent over the past 12 months.

.au consistently places in the top 10 of all country codes (out of a respectable 283); no small feat considering a population size of only 23 million.

Age and renewal rates

Almost 40 percent of all .au domain names have been registered for between two to six years, a positive sign of a maturing namespace.

While there is a large majority (43%) of names under two years old, we also found seven percent have been registered for more than 10 years.

The report also found domain names that are at least six years old (having been renewed for the 3rd or subsequent time) are over 80 percent likely to renew again.

IPv6 and DNS queries

IPv6 requests are also increasing at a steady rate. This quarter over 10 percent of clients are using IPv6 to query AusRegistry’s systems. This number highlights an overall trend toward IPv6 adoption, however the actual number of end users are less once infrastructure services are accounted for.

.au domains by State

In the .au domain name State of Origin, New South Wales is the victor with just under 1 million registrations, followed by Victoria (785,993) and Queensland (567,803). These results correlate with the population sizes of the states and explain why Tasmania (30,870) and the Northern Territory (12,032) recorded the least registrations.

Length of domain names

When it comes to domain names, size matters.

Our analysis of .au domains by character length revealed names in 10-13 character field the most common.

Interestingly, 38,432 .au domain names are 28 characters or more long, with four domain names recording the maximum length allowable at 63 characters.

The report follows the publication of a yearly survey into consumer attitudes of the .au namespace, and a 2011 Deloitte Access Economics study into the economic contribution of the namespace to the Australian economy.