theregister.com goes live

Hello there; we switched on theregister.com last week and plenty of you seemed to have found out already, judging from the traffic figures.

So why did it take us so long to put up theregister.com? Well, the URL was owned until last year by someone else, a domain broker, who flogged it to us for a very reasonable sum

Right now, theregister.com is identical to the theregister.co.uk, but we plan to offer a filter for US readers in due course. This is contingent on a new content management system we're scoping - so expect nothing for at least a couple of months.

A Register US living at theregister.com will replace www.theregus.com, which we switched off at the end of October, 2002, after a nine month trial. A colleague forgot to post a story at the time (doh!) and because fewer than 30 people asked us about its demise in the first couple of weeks, we wrote to everyone personally. Since then, several people a week have asked where it went. So here is a very belated (sorry) reply.

The Register US was an experiment which, in its current form, did not pan out, commercially or in reader numbers. We peaked at 400K readers in May 2002, falling gently to 350k in October.

Half of The Register UK's monthly traffic of 2.2 million readers comes from North America. In other words most American and Canadian readers voted with their feet for theregister.co.uk. Advertisers too.

Even so, we would have continued theregus.com as a filter for those who are uninterested in European news ... if our content management system was up to it. Unfortunately it isn't, necessitating huge duplication of manual effort, especially on the part of the journalists. Which is where the new CMS will come in.

We will update you on a new Register US and our new CMS when we have some more news. ®