Does Your City Have What It Takes?
From ICANN’s point of view, any city can apply for its own top-level domain. In practice, however, you should look at some important indicators to decide if your city is a good candidate for a city top-level domain. These indicators are the best predictor of whether your city will get enough registrations to support a top-level domain.
- Population
- Gross Domestic Product
- Internet Penetration
- Intangibles
In addition to quantitative measures, intangibles such as civic pride can play a role — will the businesses and residents of your city want to display their allegiance?
Population
We estimate that a city’s Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) needs to have a population of about 2 million for a city to give itself a good shot at a profitable, self-sustaining top-level domain registry. An MSA includes suburbs and other cities that are part of the same metropolis. According to 2008 statistics published by the the U.S. Census Bureau (2008 numbers), 44 urban MSAs have a population of over 2 million.
Gross Domestic Product
A bigger city has more people to buy domain names, but they need to have sufficient income to purchase them. A typical $10/year price means that a domain name is inexpensive enough to be an impulse buy, but income levels can have an effect on whether registrants buy more than one domain, and whether they renew or not. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes statistics on U.S. metropolitan area GDP.
Internet Penetration
A large population will not lead to domain name sales if they are not connected to the Internet. Internet penetration measures how many people are connected to the Internet in an area. In the U.S. generally, Internet penetration is quite high, but varies region to region, generally in line with GDP. The Internet World Stats site provides a variety of Internet usage and population statistics for many regions.
Intangibles
The biggest variable in domain name adoption is the policy of the top-level domain, which needs to be flexible and customer-friendly. It’s also important to keep in mind whether the population likes to identify itself by the name of the top-level domain. For instance, people from New York are known to be fiercely proud of their city. This will translate into more registrations for the eventual .nyc, because New Yorkers will want to display their allegiance.
Finally, there’s the choice of the character string to be used in the top-level domain. For instance, New York City chose “NYC” because it’s a common abbreviation and a global brand, while London chose to use its full name. You will want to make sure you pick a name that people actually use and identify with.
