The cost of owning a .CA is no where cheap enough to offset the expected return value on 95% of the names out there. If you own some of the better names, paying 10$ to register it, or 100$ is negliable, since you will turn a tidy profit. Between the pricing model, our extremely low population, relative to total land area, and tight ownership rules, we've put ourselves into a corner.
If you are one of the few around here that buys low, monitizes as best they can, and eventually sells high, then you may be able to get by. For most potential owners / investors, just about anywhere else would be more profitable.
Now, if CIRA stops ruining the suffix and starts, oh I don't know, promoting it? And even went as far as opening it up to the world, well then you'd see a gold rush like no other, and top holders of names would be "broke off" something fierce.
3 points need to be addressed:
1. CIRA's raison-d'être is not to ensure that
squatters domain investors are enriched, it's to administer the registry professionally
2. Canadian designers/web designers have "gotten it" over the past 2 years or so - i.e. .ca is the way to reach Canadians.
I made a point of observing websites advertised over the past 36 hours, on TV and in public.
Here's my list:
2 dot-com's - robinsdonuts.com - thumbs down - granted, they regged the .com first, in 1998, and the .ca in 2000. However, after 10 years, they should have switched to .ca by now (Thunder Bay H.O. - probably a smaller designer)
itscanadastime.com - major thumbs down - a pfizer site - if targetting Canadians, why not itscanadastime.ca - probably a U.S. braintrust
18 dot-ca's
the regular H.O. site, eg.
dove.ca
chevrolet.ca
homehardware.ca
eharmony.ca (kudos - not eharmony.com/canada like dell, but a complete Canadian site)
hnb.ca
progressmedia.ca
pottypatch.ca
However, the striking observation are the phrase .ca's that have started being used recently:
silhouetteandme.ca
bringingvaluehome.ca
rightplacerighttime.ca
chewtowin.ca
babycenter.ca (shouldn't it be babycentre.ca)
smokershelpline.ca
brewsomegood.ca
freshenergy.ca
safewaychampionship.ca
newgolf.ca
thefamilybehindthefarm.ca
Canada corps. are creating sites the way that domains and the internet should be used, and almost exclusively with .ca's
The .ca growth push to over 1.3 million has been constant and regular, and shows no signs of slowing, without CIRA's intervention.
3. A decent annual marketing campaign would need a minimum of $2,000,000, which would be about 20% of CIRA's current budget. There's only one source for that money - a 25% increase in the base cost of domains - a permanent ANNUAL increase of $2.00 per domain. This would actually create DOWNWARD pressure on the number of registrations, instead of upward.
(And once an item is put into the budget, it's NOT coming out.)
If it's not broke, what needs to be fixed?
The consensus on the forum seems to be: concentrate on DEVELOPMENT, not just parking.