Economic Survival Strategies Push .ng Names to 84,931

• Economic Survival Strategies Push .ng Names to 84,931

The rush by Nigerians to promote their online businesses as a means for economic survival has pushed the country’s .ng domain name registrations to 84,931, the President, Nigeria Internet Registration Association, Mr. Sunday Folayan, has said.

NiRA is the manager of Nigeria’s country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), which is the country’s digital footprint on the World Wide Web (www).

While speaking with our correspondent on Friday, the NiRA president said that the registration drive was expected given that the economic situation in 2016 was quite different from the economic climate in 2017.

“With the desperate measure to sell goods and services online for economic survival, thereby reaching millions of potential customers and clients, Nigerians have since re-strategised in their plans for promoting their online business and hence, there is improvement in the domain name count,” Folayan said.

According to him, the number of registrations recorded in March has been the highest so far.

“For the month of March 2017, there were a total of 6,797 domain name registrations. This figure is more than the March 2016 registrations of 4,129. This is indeed a remarkable improvement.

“The March 2017 total registration is more than the total February 2017 registration of 5,254. This trend shows the improvement in the number of domain registrations,” he added.

A report from NiRA had earlier shown that 12, 005 new .ng domain names were registered in the first quarter of 2017.

According to the Q1 data, 3, 747 .ng domain names were registered in January; 3,711 in February; and 4,547 in March this year.

A breakdown of the report showed that in January, there were 3,747 registered domains; 1,812 renewed domains with only 75 transferred domains. In all, there were 63,959 third level active domains with 15,291 active domains at the second level, making all .ng domain names in the country to hit 79,250 as of January 2017.

In February, there were 3,711 registrations; 1,543 renewals, 50 transfers, making 66,043 active third level domains, while 15, 443 domains were on the second level domains. Thus, the grant total of domain names in the country jumped to 81,486.

In March, domain name registrations were 4,547; renewals were 2,250; transfers stood at 177, bringing active third level domains to 69,233. With another 15,698 domain names at second level, the grant total for the month of March was 84,931.