500,000 Russian .рф Domain Names Registered in the First Week

Internationalized domain names stirred quite a controversy when the idea was proposed but ICANN's decision to move forward faster with plans to launch the domain names for non-romanic languages seems to have been quite a success. IDN ccTLDs were made available in Russia about a week ago and there have been around 500,000 registered already, a huge number by any metric.

"Before the registration started, in an interview for the КоммерсантЪ (Commersant) daily, Andrey Kolesnikov, CEO of the Coordination Center for .ru/.рф, said that they expect to have about 100,000 domain names registered by the end of the year," a blog post by ICANN, the international organization that handles domain name allocations, reads.

"It turned out they needed less than three hours to reach to the 100,000 domain names! Such a gold rush was not expected, and numbers continued to grow – 200,000 within 6 hours from the beginning of the registration period," the post said.

The excitement around the localized top level domain name was greatly underestimated. It only took three hours to reach the 100,000 registered domains that the authorities estimated would be acquired by the end of the year.

Two days ago the figure was at 460,000 registered domains and has now reached 500,000, showing that the trend is slowing down, as expected.

Still the figure is more than impressive. The regular .ru ccTLD assigned to Russia has been sold three million times so far. This makes the 500,000 new domains registered even more impressive.

However, considering that many domain owners would want to register them with the new .рф, to prevent others from doing it if nothing else, it makes sense. The success of the Cyrillic ccTLD bodes well for the further roll out of the program. Earlier this year Arab language domains went live.