Once considered “the new frontier” in domain names, the dot tel TLD has shrunk in size faster than George Costanza’s wiener in that Seinfeld episode.
Current data from HosterStats are rather disappointing: .tel has fallen below the 250,000 registrations mark, bringing its growth to a negative 10%.
This was to be expected, after the mutilated TLD – upon which one cannot build web sites – clocked one year of existence.
In May 2009, Telnic announced with great fanfare that .tel registrations crossed the 200,000 mark; by comparison, the highly successful .me is currently pushing 400,000 registrations.
One has to wonder whether there are a lot of Registry owned .tel domains in that 245,000 number of current .tel registrations. But we’ll never know for sure.
Adding insult to injury, after many domainers that fell for the promises of expanding on the .tel DNS and format capabilities dropped their domains in March, Telnic is now throwing in a new “option”: IDN .tel domains.
That’s right.
Moving onto the global territory that is not quite aware of the reduced capabilities of .tel as compared to any normal TLD, Telnic will now be tapping the multi-language market in several languages: Chinese, Danish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
They left out Klingon and Aramaic.
All of this of course does not matter; one cannot host, develop, park or monetize a .tel.
The introduction of AdSense on a TLD that is by default a bunch of hypertext links is ridiculous. The .tel TLD is nothing more than a glorified contact card that also falls behind in SEO exposure.
On June 15th, launch date of IDN .tel domains the usual sound of crickets will once again denounce what appears to be the first TLD ever to have made it past the ICANN “thought stables” while in pre-beta state.
I fell for these buggers the first time, not anymore. Tel has to be the most useless tld of them all.
SJK, sorry to interrupt you and Imma let you finish but tel is the most useless tld OF ALL TIME! OF ALL TIME!
“but tel is the most useless tld OF ALL TIME! OF ALL TIME!”
Yes but the You Tube video promoting .TEL was good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXYXwTQRNNs
I do not understand, why people need .tel ?
It just a “card”. Nothing more.
SJK – Hear, hear! 😀
Tia – 😛
Tricolorro – Slut.tel looks beautiful. If Telnic intended .tel to be a dogger’s paradise, they succeeded.
Juan – Totally agree.