insight 

We became aware of increased activity by the .tk registry (Tokehau – a small collection of islands in the South Pacific) recently when they opened their London office in August and have seen a real spike in media activity from them and massive increase in number of registrations.

There’s some interesting stuff about how they’re set up in terms of commercial arrangements and who makes what money (see http://www.dot.tk/en/pageC00.html), however, what’s interesting about them for me is the services they’re offering and how they’re getting people interested in the .tk name. They appear to have three core products:

1. a product that takes a long URL such as

http://www.nominet.org.uk/registrars/systems/serviceannouncements/

which then suggests a shorter easier to remember alternative, such as www.serviceannouncements.tk and sets it live for a 30 day period.

2. a free domain name registration service, which requires a level of visits and the .tk registry make their money by placing advertising on the site

3. paid for domain name registration which does not have to carry advertising

They appear to be selling direct and promoting themselves via PR and direct presence. I imagine they should get some good take up and that would certainly appear to be the case so far with their claims of 1.6m names already on the register and 10,000 new domains being registered per day. It would be interesting to know if they’re paid for domains or simply, the thirty day short URL product.

Other key questions for me are:

What will the take up be in terms of brands that actually use the domain as their primary domain?

How will they fair when it comes to renewals?

Will there be a secondary market and how will it fair in the long-term?