Second level registrations now make up about 17% of .au domains.
auDA, the organization that manages Australia’s .au country code domain name, reported today that there were 740,000 .au “direct” registrations by the end of Q1 this year. That marks the one-year (and six-day) anniversary of the launch of these domains.
By “direct”, auDA means second level registration. Previously, registrants had to register third level domains such as example.com.au. Now, people can register example.au.
Registrations picked up in Q4 2022 after a priority period for existing registrants expired.
Nearly 80,000 first level domains were registered by the end of March 2022l, just six days in. The next quarter was slow, with 170,000 registered by the end of June. But 550,000 were registered by the end of Q3 as the priority period came to a close, and .au ended 2022 with 716,000 second level registrations.
auDA gave existing registrants of third level .au domains just six months to have priority to register the matching second level domain. That was much shorter than the five years Nominet gave .uk registrants when it released second level domains.
As of the end of March, there are 4.2 million .au registration across the second and third levels.
Recently, auDA announced that it was putting the contract to run the technical backend registry for these 4.2 million domains out to bid.
