On its company blog this morning BuyDomains Asks, is the most popular gTLD here to stay?
|
TLD Overview (As of July 11, 2013) |
|
|
All TLDs |
145,865,255 |
|
.COM |
109,598,525 |
|
.NET |
15,131,258 |
|
.ORG |
10,343,917 |
|
.INFO |
6,599,817 |
|
.BIZ |
2,375,364 |
|
.US |
1,816,374 |
“No one could have predicted the success of the .com extension, but compared to other extensions such as .net, .org, and .info,.com domains are far more popular.
However, with the introduction of the new gTLDs to market, there is certainly the possibility of a shift in popularity in the near future.
Today, over 109 million .com domains account for 75% of all gTLDs.
That’s then followed by .net at 10%, .org at 7% and .info at 4%, all significantly less than the .com percentage.
The .biz and .us hardly even make a dent in the total, let alone the other TLDs that are not listed here as the six most popular gTLDs, not including ccTLDs.
So why the overwhelming number of .com domains?
Perhaps all the type-in traffic that the .com extension receives is responsible. More often than not, when someone is searching for a keyword or a particular domain, they are going to assume a “.com” ending. “”
The rest of the post is a basically ad for BuyDomains.com own inventory, but the question of what the effect on the new gTLD’s will be on the value of .com’s and other extensions is one we have been talking about at TheDomains.com for over 3 years.
BuyDomains.com is owned by the Name Media, the same company that runs Afternic.com which has already announced it will be working on several new gTLD strings in partnership with Demand Media’s Namejet.com.
Other companies in the space including Sedo and Godaddy are all looking at new gTLD’s as sources of substantial revenue.
While .com is certainly here to stay its share of overall percentage of domain registration is certain to shrink over the next few years.
A: “absolutely YES”
“…com….is certain to shrink over the next few years.”
garbage is garbage – whether it is long descriptive .com term or a shorter descriptive non.com.
Just a matter of when you want to shift your loses 🙂
into my 15th calendar year I have owned as many as 25,000 .com’s and now – and worked very hard – with some pain – to get it too less than 5,000 – And I am not done – so I I contributed to the “shrink”.
So lets not empty words from the ‘interweb’s – who have no skin in any game – distort what “shrink” means.
Is .com here to stay? Yes.
Will it remain the most popular? Yes.
Are there others? Yes.
Brian
That’s not the question
.com with 109M registrations out of 146 million overall TLD’s
Will the 109 M number continue to grow?
Will it continue to represent 75% of all TLD registrations?
When you go to the store, which brand of cereal or toilet paper do you choose from the rows and rows of brands?
You choose the one that is most recognizable ,brandable and maybe the cheapest using coupon codes.
There you go…dot com is king
as for toilet paper, I still prefer garden hose. yum yum my garden spinach tastes so good.
“Will it continue to represent 75% of all TLD registrations?”
But – That is the question I offered an answer using your word – “shrink”
Well logically the good .Coms will become less and less available, however price increases will rise dramatically. This is due to the .Com being first to grab the “market share and the public’s trust”.
The fortune is in the .Coms
Take a look at HowStuffWorks.com that sold for $250 million. And by the way, I have HowYouMakeIt.com for sale.
The reason dot com became the poster boy of domains can be tracked back to who had the first right to sell a domain name. Network Solutions had the first contract to sell domains and since their motto was “The DotCom People” which was part of their logo it is clearly the extension you would choose when registering names way back then. So the popularity and boom of dot com can be traced all the way back to a few words placed in a logo. Truly marketing in its simplest form.
“Will it continue to represent 75% of all TLD registrations?”
Since dot com has 109 million registrations and second best dot net has 15 million it would take a massive amount of domains to be registered in other extensions to even make a dent in that 75%. Since there are over 36 million domains registered in net, org, info, biz, and us it clearly shows that other extensions are popular and will continue to gain popularity. Lets be realistic, 36 million domains is a hell of a lot of names. Think about it like this, 33% of all domains registered are not dot com or one third of all domains registered. This is not including all the other extensions so this number is actually even higher.
I think total registrations is a very poor metric to use and has little correlation to value.
.INFO has 6.5M regs and has very limited usage or value.
.TK has what 15M registrations…and who cares? They are offered for free and are a favorite of spammers and scammers. When is the last time you have seen a .TK advertised?
.COM will continue to grow in raw numbers and value. .COM grew organically with the internet and is known and trusted by the masses. There is a reason it is number 1 and will stay that way.
Brad
BrianWick: so, i have really no skin in the game but ive been observing. hold on lemme get thousands of mediocre .com’s real quick here so i can be objective…
keep thinking that light .mobi .biz .info breeze is anything like whats about to happen. i know you think this is “holding steady, holding your position” but its clouding your judgement.
keep holding to the argument that no 1 gTLD will ever get close to .COM…. cause you’d be right about that one but you’re missing the point and its right in front of your face.
Actually, .com has been losing ground to ccTLDs. This is a trend that has been clear for many years.
The new and not-so-new TLDs are the laggards in the race – and the losers too.
It sure seems like the .de names get some mighty fine sales. I commend those who invested and/or snatched some gems in that Teutonic extension.
The big difference between the new gTLDs and the previous TLD rollouts is .brand. Pretty soon some of the most recognized brands and most visited websites will be using an extension other than .com for their websites – their own .brand. Apple, Google, CBS, Yahoo, Amazon, Macy’s, Fox, BBC, Sony, Virgin, Samsung, ABC, etc. will be using their own TLDs, and their existing .com domains will just be used to redirect to their .brand. For businesses, that $10 a year .com domain is going to start looking like an AOL email address did a decade ago.
so cyrus –
what about the small to medium size company that caters to the free market capitalism and the middle class – that is what .com’s are all about – startups. Are you saying the middle class is going away – where I would agree with you – and that is why I continue to clean out my portfolio to under 5,000 .com’s ?
Brian,
I think the “.com is king” era will be over soon, because instead of .com & the also-rans, we’ll have .brand & everything else. .Com won’t have any more prestige than .info or .name, or the new .web, .inc, etc., when the big players aren’t using it anymore. It’s actually good news for existing TLDs such as .info.
.Brand is not necessarily out of reach for medium-sized businesses. The initial expense is high, but a lot of businesses make $185,000 investments (and that could be lower in the next gTLD round). The yearly maintenance fees ($25k to ICAAN & as little as $15k to a back-end registry) are about what a medium-sized business spends on an employee each year. I’m not saying it’s a necessity at this point – a lot of big brands didn’t apply for a TLD (Facebook, NBC, Coca-Cola), but .com is definitely going to lose its cachet.
Brand domains will not overtake .Coms. So let’s be real. When most people look for something on the internet is not a brand.
And even it it was what the heck good is that going to do you if you don’t even own the brand!
The whole brand gTLD thing was designed ICAAN so they could make more money and make it from the fortune 500 and fortune 1,000 companies.
Then those company apply and buy them to “protect” their brand!
So for the majority of the domainers my advice is to stay focused on the dot coms.
Sure the best ones are gone. It is a buy and sell industry now, and sometimes a buy and develop industry.
For instant I have a domain for sale. HowYouMakeIt.com I envision that not only is the educational market worldwide but also the TV – Internet and Mobile would be the media to access for the do it your selfers.
So you cannot buy it for Godaddy because I bought it 8 years ago after I saw HowStuffWorks.com sell for $250 million to the Discovery Channel.
So .Coms will be here for a very long time. The majority of the Domainers market
already know this.
Karlj, No one suggested that brand TLDs will “overtake” .com or compete with it. But the fact that some of the biggest & most influential companies are going to stop using .com for their websites is going to have an impact. Those companies are the main reason .com has been king all these years. People wanted to use the same TLD that Apple & Google were using, but that won’t be possible anymore.
It reminds me of the perceived prestige of the 212 area code in Manhattan. That’s still important to some people over 50, but people under 30 are quite satisfied with 646, rather than the area code their grandmother & her accountant have.
I also think the days of six- and seven-figure domain name sales will end. If a buyer has that kind of money to spend on a single domain name, they might as well get their own TLD.
blackcyrus, .Coms are making domainers the most money now where it counts.
The question are .coms here to stay. The answer is Of Course and that is what counts for those of us who are making money now.
It is like asking the question 15 years ago, “Are 800 Numbers here to stay?”
There are 888’s 777’s and others now but everyone knows the 800 are toll free automatically.
Everything on Earth is finite. Apple made the iPhone and now this spawned a whole new industry of buying and selling used phones.
So in regards to the .Coms many other extentions are being spawned BUT the .Coms buying and selling is were the real money is right now where it counts.
People need money now and investsors want returns on their investment as fast as possible so that is why .Coms are here to stay.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the impact of corpTLDs.
Not every company will be able to afford one, and that is taking into consideration that the cost of running a registry is going to plummet (the technical part can be outsourced). The simple reason is that we cannot have millions of TLD strings.
On the other hand hand the supply of domain names in a single extension is virtually infinite. That is why we already have more than 100M .com and we can accommodate even more.
For the companies that are already heavily branded on .com the benefits of branded TLDs are not so obvious.
Of course most businesses would prefer a 800 toll-free number but the supply is limited of numbers (big difference with domain names). Not all numbers are equal, some are more meaningful or memorable than others.
The same reality prevails in .com too. Just like there is only one flowers.com, there is only one 1-800-flowers.
As I said earlier, .com has for years been losing market share to ccTLDs in terms of percentages. But it has continued to grow nonetheless. Compare that with the sluggish growth or stagnation in some extensions like .biz for example.