I was in the UK a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t help noticing how much .com, .net and .biz are used over there by UK companies relative to Australia. I’m talking about by UK based companies with a seemingly UK market – even local tradespeople and shops often had something other than .co.uk painted on their vans or shop windows.
.co.uk was dominant but it seemed not nearly as so as the .au is in Australia. So I conducted a rigorous scientific experiment….
I counted the number of .uk’s compare to the number of non-.uk domain names I saw written on vehicles, shops and signs while I was driving around suburban Manchester. Note: I excluded non-UK vehicles from the survey.
After about an hour (miraculously avoiding any accidents!), I had the following results:
21 co.uks
17 non co.uks (almost all were .com)
So co.uk is preferred 55% of the time.
On my return, I perfumed the same experiment in Australia.
26 com.au’s (no net.au’s surprisingly)
2 non com.aus (all coms)
That equates to a 93% preference for com.au.
So what does this mean? It clearly shows that Australians are very much more loyal to .au that the Brits are to .uk. But I think it says something about relative valuations too. The following might be considered as drawing a long bow but bear with me 🙂
It’s generally accepted that co.uk domains are very much more valuable that their equivalent com.au domains (with the usual geographic and cultural exceptions). Hard to say how much but let’s put a figure on it for the sake of the argument. Let’s say co.uk are worth five times the com.au. For example:
– If HousePrices.com.au is worth $20K, HousePrices.co.uk would be worth $100K
– Jobs.com.au is worth $400K, Jobs.co.uk is worth $2M
– BuyLaptopsOnline.com.au is worth $500, BuyLaptopsOnline.co.uk is worth $2,500
Sounds reasonable?
Now the underlying driver behind valuations is supply & demand. There’s obviously a higher demand for co.uk’s in the UK due to a much higher population and that’s why co.uk domains are worth more after all but are they really worth five times more? Or, putting it another way, are com.au domains undervalued?
OK back to my robust & comprehensive study…
Population of the UK is 61M but only 55% of the population uses co.uk, that means the effective market is only 34M. For Australia, the market is 93% of 21M or 20M.
So, here’s the question – should co.uk values really be worth 5 x that of com.au values when the demand/market is only 1.7 x the size? Are .co.uk domains over valued or com.au domains undervalued.
The other thing to consider is the number of domains registered. There are 1.5M com.au domains servicing a market of 20 compared with 8M co.uk domains servicing a market of 34M. Does this mean for Australia to ‘catch up’ to UK values, there needs to be around 6M com.au domains registered? If that happens, .au domain values will surely skyrocket.
Disclaimer: Some huge assumptions and estimations and small sample sizes could render the above arguments almost worthless. However comparing markets like this is often good food for thought so please add your feedback below!
Gents
Please can you give me some history as to why Australia has .com.au and not .co.au. ?
Was this due to a lack of understanding and, yet again, general global ignorance?
D,
It seems that this was a legacy handed to us by Robert Elz, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Robert_Elz , anyone have more info?
I think there’s a few more aspects to this than supply and demand. It’s also the how deep the pockets are of the domain name purchasers, for example if a supermarket chain in UK sells products to double the population of Australia, they are going to have deeper pockets and able to pay more for a domain name.
The same UK supermarket company could also be willing to pay more for the domain name because it could provide a better return on investment (than an Australian domain)- more people in the UK to tap into online, more people buying online.
Google’s localised results are meaning that the more you can tailor a domain/website to Australia the more chances its going to have of ranking well on the search engines in Australia. A very good reason to get a .com.au if your target market is in Australia.
I would say at least 93% of Australian businesses target market are Australian focused therefore .com.au makes sense.
anyone can buy a .co.uk. Its unregulated inlike Australia. This is why the market in the UK is far more active and more useful for businesses and the economy.
Anyone can buy and sell a .co.uk with no restrictions ( unlike here the in backwards AUDA controlled .com.au space.)
Until AUDA deregulates the excessive restrictions that have burdened Australia there will be little chance in the online market of Australia.
To summarise AUDA needs to
1. cut the fees they charge. ( the wholesale price is still $20 here as opposed to a few $ for .co.uk and .com)
2. cancel their restictions on buying and selling names. ( they need to open and change so they are in line with the rules for .com and .co.uk rules).
Example go here http://www.asiaregistry.com look at all the domain name extensions you can buy that dont have the excessive restrictions Australia has.
Auda is 5- 10 years behind the rest of the world in understanding domain names, the internet and current world policies.. sometimes It feels like we are in china… but even worse as anyone can freely buy and sell a .cn name!
Nice one. I have lived and worked in the UK and you’re right, so many .com’s used.
I was amazed at the different extensions used, it’s almost as though .co.uk is a second tier domain extension inside the UK to .com
I appreciate your insight into both the UK and Australian domain marketplace, it was a very interesting read… A few weeks ago I was looking at buying a .uk domain name but was intimidated not only by the asking price, but more so by the sheer amount of trademarks that render many names too risky to monetize…
…So basically, premium Australia domains are cheaper, less likely to have trademark disputes and preferred to the ‘.com’ version… Sounds like we are sitting on a goldmine…