If you are a web entrepreneur, you should be very interested in the size and health of your market and your competition. One number that should be prominent in your business planning is the total number of domains purchased in your country. This can tell you the size of your competition and the health of your domain hosting system.
Online Africa has just complied the total domains purchased in each African country for the week of August 2, and the list has a few surprises:
While Zimbabwe’s web hosting companies only maintain 2,033 websites, they sold 208 new domains, far outselling Egypt, with 20x greater market size. Uganda had a net loss of 29 websites from local hosting companies, making it the worst performing market in this sample week.
Kenya’s poor showing at #7, behind much smaller Ghana, might be a wake-up call to question .ke domain name prices. Rwanda, with all its Internet hype, ranked along side DRC Congo and Togo in sales.
Now one week does not make a year, but the numbers do show where ICT penetration is high and where investment and competition should be strong. ANd where local web hosting companies should really be working harder.
Wayan
this is very interesting and a useful indicator most definably… … but unless you look at all domain types you may miss a great deal of action. My guess is that country name domains remain expensive compared to .org, .info etc… see here for some insight into pricing and registration… http://afridns.org/ the question that comes to mind… what country domains are used the most, which ones are so affordable they make it appealing to use them rather than the old standbys?
Tim
We had a debate about the cost of .ke domain names recently, which prompted this post. Yes, African domains need to be cheaper and easier to obtain for them to have any chance against .com, .org etc. yet there is resistance to this by the registars. Here’s the response to the .ke debate.
Edward, this is just sales in August 2010. Not total number of sales for 2010 or existing domains. So unless you bought 762 domains in August, the list isn’t wrong.
What are you doing with 762 domains anyway?