VENTURES AFRICS – The Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA) has sold over 30, 000 .ng domain names from the 9, 000 sold as at 2010, following its reduction of the price from 200,000 naira ($1,259) to 15,000 naira ($94) per due to poor patronage.

The Chief Operating Officer of NIRA, Mr. Ope Odusan, told THISDAY that Nigerians preferred the .ng top-level domain name, to the .com.ng domain name but complained that the 200, 000 naira ($1,259) per year charge was exorbitant.

“From our statistics, only 32 .ng domain names were sold in three years, and 30 out of the 32, were bought by foreigners doing business outside Nigeria, while only two were bought by Nigerian residents, THISDAY Newspapers and MTN Nigeria,” Odusan said.

He explained that after the price was slashed, NIRA registered over 300 .ng domain names within five days.

“This is a major shift and the number of purchase is on the increase,” he said.

“We are creating awareness to let people know that .ng is faster and cheaper, and that it is affordable. It takes extra time for information generated in Nigeria to go outside the shores of the country to places like US and UK, to hit the servers that are hosted there, before returning to Nigeria to deliver the message. But if the server is hosted in Nigeria, and contents are hosted in Nigeria, information does not need to travel long distances before they are eventually delivered in Nigeria, and this reduces time of transaction to a great extent.”

He further explained that though the .ng is called a second level domain name, it is actually a country code Top Level Domain name.

“We are taking the campaign to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), big corporations, churches, mosques, and market places to make people have better ideas of .ng domain name,” the COO stated.

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