Nigeria has so far recorded a total of 167,798 registrations for its country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), .ng. This figure was recorded as of August this year when 3,256 registrations were added.
Data released by the Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA), showed that the .ng had recorded a total of 20,053 registrations between January and August. According to NiRA, subscriptions for the domain name, which stood at 147,745 in December 2019, rose to 150, 111 in January this year as 2,366 new registrations were recorded in the month. In February, 2,800 new registrations were recorded, bringing the total to 152,911, while 754 registrations were recorded in March.
In April, a record of 1,777 new registrations brought the country’s .ng database to 155,442, while the figure increased by 1,630 in May to 157,072. June and July saw the figure rose to 160,276, and 164,542 respectively.
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The country’s internet asset which is being managed by NiRA had witnessed remarkable growth over the last three years, even though many Nigerian websites are still registered with the foreign domain names. This had prompted NiRA to set a target of one million active web addresses on the .ng domain name in five years, starting from 2019.
However, the pace of growth has slowed down over the last year, thus casting a shadow of doubt over the one million target of NiRA. Currently, Nigeria has one of the lowest registrations for the country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) in the world. Nigerians’ preference for foreign domain names, especially, the United State’s .com has been the bane of the .ng, thus denying the country huge revenue from the national resource.
One of the reasons cited by web developers for not using the .ng for their clients was cost. According to them, the cost of registering Nigeria’s .ng is far higher than that of the .com. While a .com domain name can be registered for as low as N2,000, a cheap .ng registration is sold for N11,000 while the premium names are sold for as high as N1 million.
To encourage more Nigerian businesses to register their businesses online with the .ng domain, NiRA had last month announced a discount on the cost of registration for three months. According to the Association, the .ng promotion which commenced on the 24th of August 2020 would be on until the 21st of November 2020.
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