In the .UK namespace there is only one king, and that is .CO.UK . Everyone in the United Kingdom knows it, most use it and it is all but too late to get a good one. Enter .ORG.UK .
Going by Nominet’s own statistics the historic rate of .ORG.UK registrations was verging on 5% of its .CO.UK cousin, however in 1999 when the price change increased volume of .CO.UK registrations to over 100,000 per month .ORG.UK did jump to 7.5% yet did not increase further.
In March this year .ORG.UK almost hit the 10,000 new registrations per month mark, only previously beaten in 2000. This along with increasing end user sales and more domainer investing bodes well for .ORG.UK .
We believe there are three key reasons for this :
- Lack of .co.uk . Quite simply there is far more .ORG.UK varients out there free to register for a fiver than there are .CO.UK’s. Likewise to aquire Keyword.co.uk it could cost five figures, yet for the similar .ORG.UK it is likely to be under five hundred quid.
- Increased site development. There has been an upturn in website development, either by domainers or internet marketers (eg. Affiliates). They look for a UK specific domain name that is cheap and easy to develop on. .ORG.UK is rumoured to hold better stead in search engine results pages than .CC or other obscure extentions.
- New Domainers. In the last four years the activity in the .UK market has significantly increased. What once was the dwelling of a small group of country specific domainers has exploded into a worldwide commoditiy. Coupled with the lack of .co.uk the domainer looks elsewhere for registration fodder, and the .ORG.UK is the natural up and coming ccTLD.
Sales are the key indicators to an extension’s success. The end users have been snaffling up keyword and acronym .ORG.UK’s , however when domainers themselves start to invest it usually is a sure sign it has legs. It is now not unknown for .ORG.UKs to be quickly sold in the reseller market for £30-150 a piece, with the buyers expecting to hold and profit in the future.
All the figures point to a rough valuation of the .CO.UK being worth seventeen times the value of a .ORG.UK . It has risen to this in the last three years from a start point of near reg-fee. If the prices keep going up is another question! 
