Brand Protection Registrations

There's a lot of them.

[jmccormac]

I've been doing some research on the numbers of brand protection registrations in the various gTLDs. While it is not possible to get 100% accuracy without checking each domain name individually, there is another approach of checking if a domain is registered in other TLDs and on the same hoster. Brand protection registrations by their very nature will have the same domain appearing across more than one TLD. The TLDs in the survey were .com .net .org .biz .info .mobi and .asia and the zonefiles were for 01/July/2010. The total number of domains in the survey was 119,361,431. These are the results:

TLD - Total - Cross TLD Domains - Percentage
.com - 88,204,371 - 6,619,959 - 7.50%
.net - 13,143,605 - 6,074,721 - 46.22%
.org - 8,329,647 - 3,940,164 - 47.30%
.biz - 2,062,053 - 1,192,120 - 57.81%
.info - 6,471,955 - 2,470,769 - 38.18%
.mobi - 969,061 - 493,954 - 50.97%
.asia - 180,739 - 62,937 - 34.82%

The .com percentage is comparatively low because of its size. Many people registering their domain in a ccTLD will also register their domain in .com if it is available. What is amazing about these figures is the way that possible brand protection registrations form a major part of the newer TLD registration numbers. The .info figures are strange because of the way that registrations are subsidised.

Regards...jmcc

[HuskyPup]

I know this is a bit of an over-simplification however you are basically saying that ~45-50% of non .com registrations appear to be brand protection?

Is this proof of why they want to introduce new extensions?

[jmccormac]

It would appear that there is quite an overlap, HuskyPup,
And then there is the element of ccTLD/gTLD registration overlap. Some businesses such as Microsoft/Google etc would actively register their brands in as many TLDs as possible because they are protecting their trademark. What this data shows is that many domains will have another version of the domain in other TLDs. Now that on its own is nothing - people register generic keywords in every domain. But what makes this data different is that it checked the hoster of each of the domains and only counted domains across TLDs where the hoster is the same. The results indicate that brand protection is a major part of any new gTLD's business and a section on which they depend, whether they like it or not. I don't know if that's why they want to introduce new extensions but it does seem to explain how the process of brand protection in TLDs works with some of the newer TLDs.

Regards...jmcc