AFNIC have published their annual report on the French domain name industry. Today there are almost 1.3 million .fr names registered, making .fr the 16th largest TLD.The number of registrations is growing rapidly with 300,000 more registrations in 2008, a 36 per cent year-on-year increase which compares favourably to an average of around 20 per cent increase across all TLDs. A large part of this increase can be accredited to a liberalisation in the registration rules for .fr names in 2004.Additional highlights of the 2008 report are:
- 29.2 per cent of domain names registered in France were .fr names and 47.2% were .com names
- the number of .fr names increased by 36% (300,000 new registrations) compared to an average 20% across all TLDs while the number of .com names registered in France declined (the larger average increase is attributed to the liberalisation of registration rules in 2004)
- 84% of .fr names were renewed compared to 75% of .com names in France
- median price for a .fr name today is €12 compared to €17 in 2007
- 20% of .fr registrations are in the city of Paris while 40% are in the Ile-de-France area
- 80% of the French dictionary is now utilised for domain name registrations
- the most .fr expensive domains were voitures.fr (US$79,000), annonces.fr ($47,000) and porn.fr ($46,000)
- 5% of domain names support IPv6
- approximately 45% of .fr websites are for businesses, 5% personal websites, 17% are have waiting pages while 6% are parked or monetised.
The report in full is available in English and French from the AFNIC website.See www.afnic.fr/data/actu/public/2008/afnic-french-domain-name-report-2008.pdf for the English version and www.afnic.fr/data/actu/public/2008/afnic-observatoire-domaines-france-2008.pdf [both 5.1mb] for the French version.