One of the major problems for brand owners is protecting the brand in new TLDs. Most new Top-Level Domain (TLD) registries will depend on brand protection registrations for a major part of their registration volume and some may become almost completely dependent on these registrations if the new TLD fails to capture the public's imagination. Short of comparing the registrant data for each individual domain, there is no 100% accurate method of measuring the level of brand protection registrations in a TLD. There is a method of estimating the level of brand protection registration and that's by checking the hoster for each domain name in a TLD against similar domain names in other TLDs.
Brand protection registration patterns tend to have the same domain name term registered across different TLDs but with the same hosting data. In theory, it is very simple. In practice it means comparing the hosting data for each domain in each TLD. For a comparison of the .COM .NET .ORG .BIZ .INFO .MOBI .ASIA TLDs as of 01/July/2010, it involves comparing the hosting data for 119,361,431 domains. These are the results of that comparison:
| TLD | Cross TLD Domains | Percentage |
| .com | 6,619,959 of 88,204,371 | 7.50% |
| .net | 6,074,721 of 13,143,605 | 46.22% |
| .org | 3,940,164 of 8,329,647 | 47.30% |
| .biz | 1,192,120 of 2,062,053 | 57.81% |
| .info | 2,470,769 of 6,471,955 | 38.18% |
| .mobi | 493,954 of 969,061 | 50.97% |
| .asia | 62,937 of 180,739 | 34.82% |
The Cross TLD Domains are domains for which the same domain name term is registered in one or more of the other TLDs. The percentage of these possible brand protection registrations on .com is low because of the size of .com TLD and also because there is a pattern of ccTLD registrants registering their ccTLD domain and, if it is available, the .com form of their ccTLD domain.
Drilling down into the data reveals more interesting patterns. A hoster engaged in brand protection is going to have a different pattern to that of a domainer hoster or PPC hoster. The .com pattern for Google.com's GOOGLE.COM is:
| Hoster | .com Total | Cross TLD | Unique .com | T/C Ratio | Uniqueness |
| GOOGLE.COM | 3578 | 871 | 2707 | 4.1079 | 1.3218 |
The number of unique .com domains on is 2707. The T/C ratio is that of the total number of .com domains to Cross TLD domains. The Uniqueness is the ratio of the total .com domains on the hoster to the number of unique .com domains on the hoster. For a hoster with little or no Cross TLDs hosted, that ratio would tend towards 1. MarkMonitor.com, a Brand Protection Registrar displays a similar brand protection pattern.
| Hoster | .com Total | Cross TLD | Unique .com | T/C Ratio | Uniqueness |
| MARKMONITOR.COM | 41499 | 9535 | 31964 | 4.3523 | 1.2983 |
The pattern for PPC and parking hosters is somewhat different,
| Hoster | .com Total | Cross TLD | Unique .com | T/C Ratio | Uniqueness |
| DSREDIRECTION.COM | 1672107 | 18914 | 1653193 | 88.4058 | 1.0114 |
| SEDOPARKING.COM | 1432598 | 56206 | 1376392 | 25.4883 | 1.0408 |
| FASTPARK.NET | 248528 | 9704 | 238824 | 25.6109 | 1.0406 |
| HITFARM.COM | 605431 | 1366 | 604065 | 443.2145 | 1.0023 |
The pattern for a Super Hoster (a hoster with significant market share) is,
| Hoster | .com Total | Cross TLD | Unique .com | T/C Ratio | Uniqueness |
| DOMAINCONTROL.COM | 18509994 | 2415266 | 16094728 | 7.6637 | 1.1501 |
The most recently launched of the TLDs in the survey, .asia sTLD, has one of the lowest estimated brand protection registration percentages. However there is possibly some element of brand protection registration overlap with the ccTLDs in the region covered by .asia sTLD. The lesson for the backers of any new gTLDs is clear—brand protection registrations are still the major source of registrations and unlike many of the speculative and transient registrations of the Landrush phase, many of them will provide repeat business.
Written by John McCormac, CIO of www.hosterstats.com
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