It is moving into its Junk Dump phase (Landrush anniversary when most speculative domains that couldn't be flipped or developed are dumped) and the drops are likely to increase over the next few months. I'm not sure how low it will go yet.
Unlike past TLDs, there are probably multiple drop phases with this one.
So then this thread, on a domainer forum, should be closed?
The first Junk Dump is always the biggest. There is a smaller one on the second anniversary when some more domainer/speculative domains are dropped. Even the third one has an echo but often this is due to businesses dropping their domain as they figure out that they are not going to use it or else if they have gone bust in the meantime. The .asia is going through a mini Junk Dump at the moment and it has lost a lot of its gains it made this year.
In an ordinary TLD these drops would be far clearer as domains are included in the zonefile regardless of whether they are set up or not. The .tel registry, I think, will only put a domain in its zonefile if it is set up. This is why it claimed 280K domains at its one year anniversary while the zonefile count was 255939 (going on the 01 April 2010 figure). If Telnic (the .tel registry) has done a good job in marketing the extension then a lot of the registrations would have been business brand protection registrations and these are more likely to be renewed. The .tel sTLD has been growing well (for a small TLD) over the past few months. The danger is if these new registrations stop or slow down dramatically. The .asia had a major problem in that after the Landrush, the numbers of new registrations per month collapsed to a few thousand. The .mobi had a better time in that its new registrations per month held steady averaging about 24K a month right through the Junk Dump. The .tel is very much a niche TLD and the level of drops is going to be hard to call. (I'll probably do a new/deleted page for .tel in the next few days.)
Hopefully more people will use it in the future.
At the moment it is serving about 1.8 million pages a month to spiders and about 10K pages to real users. I've .es domain data to add before the .tel stuff. The .tel will be limited to new/deleted for each domain as the .tel domains don't actually change nameservers.
Yes.They need to keep the momentum of new registrations up but I don't know yet how bad the Junk Dump (landrush anniversary drops) will be for .tel sTLD. The .tel domain count is now below 250K active domains. (There is a difference between the number of registered .tel domains and the numbers that appear in the .tel zonefile as only working .tel domains appear in the .tel zonefile). The .tel domain count peaked around 261K domains in March 2010 and it is now down to around 249780 domains (Registrarstats.com's figure). The big drops in .tel should become apparent from Mid May 2010 onwards.
