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With the end of the year rapidly approaching, it's timely to now look back on the events that defined the domain name industry in 2011. What a year it has been, notably with the approval of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). The long anticipated new domains will bring a flood of choices for naming your home on the web and an increasing need for next generation domain management tools and practices.

Here are our domain industry highlights for you:

Internet regulatory body ICANN, concluded a lengthy history of internal debate and negotiation with multiple stakeholders that began with its formation in 1998. The organization unleashed approval to allow anybody to apply for a top-level domain. The historic move opens the doors to specifically branded domains, such as .ibm or .bmw, as well as new domains aimed at more general verticals, such as .hotel or .sport. There are also moves afoot to create domain brands for geographic regions, such as .berlin and .nyc. The application window begins January 2012, but industry observers predict that it may be 2013 before the first new domains roll off the production line. It is anticipated that the new offerings will encompass internationalised domain name (IDN) facilities, incorporating non-Latin scripts from day one.

2011 saw a marked rise in the adoption of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) across the globe; a trend likely to be accelerated as new top level domains begin to emerge. Registries from countries embracing a diversity of ethnicity and languages have been quick to become involved, with a total of 29 country code domains having been evaluated by ICANN. Malaysia has been the most recently added, enabling fuller representation of Internet names across a nation of four different official languages and numerous regional dialects. Russia operates one of the most successful domains achieving over 800,000 registrations of Cyrillic domains on the transliterated .ru country code. More recently the Russians achieved dual listing status with the launch of the top level national domain .PФ (Российская Федерация).

Are we there yet? The familiar and reliable .COM domain has been around 26 years and is by far the most popular domain with nearly half of all global registrations. Whilst Planet Earth clocked up its 7 billionth citizen in 2011, .COM is expected to attain 100 million unique domains around about the end of the year (give or take a week). It is almost unbelievable to think that this plucky little generic top level domain (gTLD) had less than 10,000 registrants back in 1995, but has now become the standard for almost every business, blogger or home user on the net.

Domainers, traders and domain real estate investors had a buoyant 2011, despite perturbations in the global economy. It seems some domains appreciate in value (a lot!). But the trick of course is to figure out which ones. In a year which saw both a Facebook movie and a staggering IPO by business network LinkedIn, it came as no surprise to see social.com change hands for a cool $2.6 million. The arrival of new gTLDs will no doubt stimulate and expand the market for highly sought after domains.

What were your highlights for 2011? We'd love to hear them in the comments.

When you have a look at our domain price list, you will notice that some domain name extensions are more expensive than others. So why is that?

There are three factors that determine our domain name pricing (apart from the fixed costs of running the business):

1. Registry price - this is the price a domain registrar is charged by the registries. What you may not be aware of is that it is not us who are actually holding your domain name but a designated registry such as VeriSign (.COM/.NET), PIR (.ORG), Nominet (.UK) or Denic (.DE). These registries charge a fee per domain to registrars which can vary considerably from one top-level domain to another. Ultimately, it is up to the registries how much they charge. This varies according to their operational cost, whether they are community-driven organizations or regulated by the government for example.
   
   
2. Currency - we usually buy domains in the local currency of a country. Most European country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) are in Euro, while others are not part of the Eurozone e.g. Denmark uses Danish Crowns, the Czech Registry is paid in Czech Crowns, so they can all be subject to currency fluctuations.
   
   
3. Support cost - some top-level domains have special registration procedures, for others you need to fulfill certain requirements for nameservers changes or whois contact updates, e.g. .EU domain updates are handled in a unique way. The world of country code domains is full of exceptional cases which have to be factored as additional support cost into the yearly registration fee as well.

As you can see there are a number of variables that influence the price for domains. We believe transparency is important, so we hope this article has given you some insight into domain name pricing.