I was tipped off from a reader that the some 42,000 .Pro registrations went into Pending Delete status yesterday according to RegistrarStats.com
According to the ICANN report the .Pro registry filed in April (last one on record) there were some 149,000 .Pro domains registered.
40,000 domains represents over 25% of all registered .Pro domain names (as of April).
I reached out to the domain name registrar, EnCira.com who just reported a couple of days ago that registrations of .Pro domain name grew at 220% over the past two years.
According to EnCira the 42,000 domains were all related to zip code .pro domain names.
Here is an example of the whois record for one of these domains:
Domain ID:D42766-PRO
Domain Name:01867.PRO
Created On:27-Aug-2010 13:10:35 UTC
Last Updated On:26-Aug-2012 23:12:34 UTC
Expiration Date:27-Aug-2012 00:00:00 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Hostway Services, Inc (R2342-PRO)
Status:PENDING DELETE RESTORABLE
Here is what Encira posted on their blog today in answer our email regarding the domains:
“”Is there a viable business with truly local domain names in the form of zipcodes like 01801.PRO, 01801.US or 01801.COM?
A few days ago, EnCirca posted a blog entry regarding the rapid growth that .PRO has experienced in the past few years. The data we used came from the Registry Reports published on the ICANN website, which are current as of three months ago.
Today, we received a note from Michael Berkins of Thedomains.com, asking me if we could explain a sudden drop of 42526 .PRO domains being reported by registrarstats.com but not yet indicated by the ICANN reports.
After some quick checking, we were able to confirm what is happening – These are all 5-digit numeric .PRO domains matching the Postal codes in the United States. For an example, do a whois search at www.registry.pro for 01801.pro.
Two years ago, there was a bulk registration in .PRO of all of the 5-digit U.S. postal codes. The single registrant of the domains was a company called HGTN sharing the same ownership as Hostway, the .PRO registry at the time. (The .PRO Registry has since been sold to Afilias)
This is not the first time someone has created a network of zipcode based websites.
Marchex has had a network of over 75,000 zipcode-based .COM and .NET domains for nearly 10 years now.
Neustar, the .US registry has operated a similar network for six years now, leased to a company called Vendare. (We note that these .US domains expired yesterday)
Presumably, the premise behind these networks is either that these domains will generate type-in traffic or be highly ranked in the search engines. We suspect this premise fails on both counts.
Although we can’t speak to the possible type-in traffic, some random searches appear to show that search engines do not cooperate in ranking these sites simply due to their string matching a zip code. An audit of several zipcode searches on Google show that none of the top search results display hits from these comprehensive zipcode networks.
Several months ago, EnCirca considered pursuing the acquisition of zipcodes domains in .PRO. But we were not convinced of the economics of the business model. Does anyone out there have any ideas or suggestions? ”
Feel free to send them to ceo@encirca.com and I will publish them in a future post.
In the meantime, the zipcode.pro domains will be dropping soon.
EnCirca would be willing to offer a special registration rate to anyone who wishes to register these names in bulk.””
Hahahahaha! All new gTLDs will fail!
(just testing the comment system)
Around August 14th (I had tweeted about it on the 15th), .name lost 10% of their registration base.
.travel has a great historical graph on RegistrarStas.com, too, which should be educational for new gTLD advocates — I can’t wait to see how .xxx will look in a few months, upon the anniversary of sunrise/landrush registrations.
lol strange
what to do
What the hell
Another .mobi in the making… it looks like repetition of .mobi failure
Total .pros registered to April 2012, excluding zip .pros, increased by 6.5% in April 2012 to 105,554.
Average daily WHOIS searches increased 13% to 86,885.
Year on year total .pros registered are up 65.3% and average daily WHOIS searches are up 194.9%.
I think this has little reflection on .pro’s growth as .pro is growing and a good clip regardless of this situation. This deals with zip.pro that operates a city search type of website. From what I’ve read of this business they has a bulk agreement to buy all the .pro zip code domains. Just today after reading this article it appears after review of zip.pro’s website that they must be changing their website to use zip codes as a sub-domain and not separate domains. I think they have a great concept there and they must have gotten a great bulk deal. I hope they remain in business as the website is really nice and hopefully all this is is them reducing their carrying costs of a lot of domains that doesn’t work for their business.
Regardless of what Encirca has published. I think if you go to sites like total.pro you will see that the registry is posting consistent growth over the last several years and whois searches have also increased significantly. Hopefully any smart domainer will be able to sort through this and realize the .pro is a growing extension. (not a big wiz-bang .co type of growth..slow steady growth international)
If we read between the lines, this response tells us that 51,887 more .pro domains are about to expire (there are 99999 zip codes in the US). So, if we use ReistrarStats daily report, that would mean that .pro will have begun the week with 151,890 registrations and will end the week with 51,887. I’m having a difficult time with the argument that this represents “growth.”
The correct math is 151,890 – 42,000 = 110,890 remaining .pro’s. They didn’t have all the zip codes registered. At the end of the day whether you like it or not there are over 100K registrants that won’t be dropping their domains any time soon!
BS domains….
nothing new.
What possible reason did you have for not including the real topic of the article, Zip Codes, in the headline ???
Over 25% Of All .Pro Domains Went Into Pending Delete Status Yesterday
Eighty percent of the article is devoted to a discussion about Zip Codes yet there is no mention of them in the headline. You are misleading your readers. You need to take some basic English and journalism classes. Your articles are full of grammatical errors every day. If a “writer” can’t write properly, how can anyone take his subject matter seriously?
There’s nothing wrong with the headline.
… except that it doesn’t reflect what’s in the article.
Pros
The highlight of the story is the loss on a percentage of all registrations the .pro registry experienced in one day, the reason behind it was secondary.
I’m fine with the headline
Absolutely nothing wrong with reporting this story! I wouldn’t see this as a huge negative for .pro as its a one time drop as a result of 1 bulk client. The underlying story for .pro is a positive one and hopefully it will help .pro reporting in the future to be more in line with actual figures. Inline with what mwzd has presented above.
Who knows maybe the new owners of the .pro registry said no way to whatever bulk registry deal was made to them anyway.
So Here’s the difference between .pro and some of the other extensions out there. Biggest .pro registrar Encirca is not afraid of advertising the drop as an opportunity to buy!
It’s a good opportunity to find some decent domains at near hand registration prices.
http://www.encirca.com/domain-news/2012/its-time-for-the-annual-pro-drop/
Here’s the link to the article.
You’ll have to visit the encirca site to see the article I was referring to that’s titled “Its time for the annual .Pro drop” posted 9/10/12
more upside as Reseller Club reportedly adds 11,000 .pro’s in their first month.
http://domainincite.com/10661-resellerclub-sells-11000-pro-domains-in-a-month