As if the news of dot .Tel falling to an all-time low in the month of January wasn’t shocking enough, there is more drama coming from the only TLD on the market that cannot host developed web content.
.tel is practically dead.
Canadian domain investor, George Kirikos, pointed out that yesterday’s losses to the number of dot .Tel registrations reached an astounding 38,000 – a drop of more than 20% of the previous totals.
Currently, the dot .Tel TLD barely surpasses dot .Name, for a total of 148,418 dot .tel domains.
What would be the point that the dot .Tel decides to pull the plug?
This post is 100% true!
Actually, as I tweeted, dot-tel is BELOW dot-name now (i.e. dot-name is at 160,533 according to RegistrarStats.com, whereas dot-tel is at 148,418).
Unless you meant “surpasses” to the DOWNSIDE. 🙂
George – Oops, you’re correct, ‘surpassing’ was a misnomer; dot .Tel is in a worse spot than any TLD due to its inability to develop content on it.
I agree with you, it’s quite a limited offering.
Seems that most of the drops were IDNs. It looks like a classic IDN bubble bursting. There’s only 14,879 more IDNs in the .tel zone at the moment.
If .name only has 160,000 registrations when everyone on earth has a name, imagine how low these niche extension registrations are going to be, especially when they’re competing for air-time.