Each country has its own unique domain name and for a while in Kenya, we were used to our domains being either co.ke for companies, .go.ke for government entity or .ac.ke if it is a local university and so on.
Now KeNIC (Kenya Network Information Centre) who are mandated to manage the administration of the .ke top level domain, has announced on their Twitter account of a potential game changer in the local domain space.
KeNIC will introduce their second level domains that will have the nomenclature “yourname.ke” soon. This means if you want to register for your own domain, you can have something like buttertoast.ke which if you had registered before, you would have settled for buttertoast.co.ke
According to KeNIC, the new level domain roll-out date is on 23rd of next month, so you have less than a month to secure yours.
According to Communication Authority of Kenya report, the country has an estimated 39.6 million Internet users of which a majority access it on mobile. Also from the same report, by December of last year, there were a total of 62,215 registered .Ke names of which the .co.ke domain held a 93% market share.
So in relation to the number of domain names and the number of Internet users, there is still a huge untapped market for the registration of domain names in the country. We will have to wait and see if the roll-out of the new level .ke domain makes a difference in the registration of domains.
