Station managers! Why use your-call-letters.com when you could use your-call-letters.tv? Why use your-favorite-show.com? Doesn't your-favorite-show.tv sound so much better? In those fin-de-siecle years, dreams and fortunes were made of less.
Current statistics from Name Intelligence, of course, tell a somewhat different story:
| TLD | Registered domains (millions) |
|---|---|
| .COM | 71 |
| .NET | 11 |
| .ORG | 6 |
| .INFO | 5 |
| .BIZ | 2 |
| .US | 1 |
Stats for other TLDs are harder to track down, but clearly they're at least 2 orders of magnitude behind .com.
There does appear to be another effort in the works to get people buying .tv (the page I linked is a redirect from www.tv). Certain "premium" domains are up for sale at premium prices. Annual fees range from $500,000 for business.tv to $100 for, say, fishness.tv. I was intrigued by rotten.tv, but not $3000 a year worth of intrigued. Non-premium names, I believe, go for a more usual fee of around $25. The full list of 52,000+ premium names makes for somewhat entertaining browsing.
What of Tuvalu? The nation of 11,000 gets a cut of revenues from its agreement with Verisign. Being extremely remote, having few natural resources and having its highest point around 5 meters above (current) sea level, it can certainly use the cash. However, there is concern that the cut could be larger. From what I can make out, the total comes to around $2M a year, better than nothing, but at around $200 per person certainly not the bonanza one might have hoped for.
The official site for Tuvalu is www.gov.tv, but be aware that their server appears very slow, possibly due to high latency as much as low bandwidth.
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