CircleID

What percentage are parked?

What percentage are constantly churned with domain-tasting?

Actually, what percentage of the 9.4million were as a result of domain tasting?

Andrew:

Speaking of VeriSign, they put out an announcement yesterday, designed to drive interest in .tv by positioning as the the TLD of choice for video.

Partnering with an online marketing company headed up by the former chairman of MySpace seems a clever and low cost/risk way to drive interest in a TLD that never measured up to initial expectations. Will be very interesting to see how successful the effort proves to be.

http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/061213/0194366.html

This huge growth in the com/net space is largely a result of the "kept names" from Domain Tasting. It is no coincidence that tasting is "in the spotlight" and Verisign is reporting huge YoY increases in the amount of retained registrations.  The good news for Verisign is that they will get renewals on most of those names, because the kept names make money.  The bad news is that we are at (or near) a peak in the amount of names that can be successfully tasted, so VRSN bulls shouldn't bank on continued registration gains like those in 2004/2005/2006. Not in com/net anyway.

Verisign will not need continued name tasting for further growth.

The dot com registry is just about saturated for ASCII, but the roll out of IE7 and the adoption of IDNs will ensure record growth in the registration of dot Com domains, not only in new registrations, but also in ground stolen from ASCII registrations in transliterations of Asian Languages as well as an incursion into ccTLD territory. As the language itself acts as a local identifier the necessity for a cctLD is somewhat reduced. Clear with the expansion of registrable characters exploding from the current 37 to something well in excess of 50,000 to many the dot com name space is suddenly going to feel an awful lot less crowded.

I think there will also be a turning point in ASCII registrations. Many will come to realise that there their hitherto valuable nest eggs are in fact worthless junk.

Clear with the expansion of registrable characters exploding from the current 37 to something well in excess of 50,000 to many the dot com name space is suddenly going to feel an awful lot less crowded.

You mean the kiters won't be able to scale up to meet the availability?