For those that think that branding a site on any non-.com is going to automatically lead to traffic bleed over to the matching .com I present the case of Beat.La.
The domain name was purchased just a couple of weeks ago by the Phoenix Suns on Sedo for $5,300
The purchase of the domain and subsequent launched received a lot of publicity from the mainstream media and sports from the LaTimes.com to the Bleacherreport.com.
According to Alexa the domain name Beat.La has an Worldwide rank of 1,463,068 and a rank in the US of 266,247 pretty impressive for a site launched less than a month ago.
There are a lot of domainers that are of the opinion that any site built on a non-.com is going to draw a lot of leakage to the matching .com
However it does not seem to be the case in this situation.
BeatLa.com which is a parked page, has no Alexa ranking at all, meaning little if any of the traffic from Beat.La is drifting over to the matching .com.
Its a sign that people can understand the importance of what they type to the right of the dot as well as the left and the learning curve for the new gTLD’s may not be as great as some think.
For those that chose to visit Beat.La, one word of advice, turn your speakers down before you head over there.
Tony Lam says
How about leakage to beat.com which is the most likely traffic gainer.
Rick Schwartz says
Alexa is not reliable and does not know how to count a type in.
Andrew Allemann says
There are two reasons I disagree with your conclusion.
First, and this is nit picky, your title says “no” leakage. There’s likely some, it’s just not enough to register.
Second, almost everyone who has heard about beat.la at this point probably read a story or forum posting and clicked over to it.
Third, and this is a bonus: it’s Alexa 🙂
BullS says
Alexa is a bogus tool to gauge traffic.
BullS says
beat.la does not meet the radio test and it does not sound as good as beatla.com
DomainNameSales.co says
I agree with Rick. Alexa is all over the place when it comes to accuracy and there is no way they can measure type in properly.
Adam Strong says
What about Beatdotla.com ?
Michael surely you have .com domains in your folio that match up to a high ranking alexa site and know what happens with leakage . . .
btw someone should do a new TLD commercial sort of like a drug commercial . . where people are frolicking in a field and riding their bikes by the beach and the announcer says how great the product is and then at the end it says . Warning : operating a company under these domain names may cause a dizzying state of confusion from investors, customer service migraines, lack of ringing at the cash register, Google withdraw, and traffic leakage. Consult a domain professional.
ontheinterweb says
anyone who hears “beat.la” and types beatla.com is an idiot. besides, beatla.com is a parked page.. they aint getting many repeat “customers” i wouldnt imagine.
even more stupid are domainers trying to “hold on” to people being idiots by saying things like “people dont want to learn new TLDs” as if they have to take a college course to realize a TLD can be any word.
nope, once you’ve seen 100 different billboards with .weird on it or 100 different commercials on TV using .strange thats all it takes. its burned into your brain that a TLD can be anything. it doesnt even matter if the websites you saw advertised failed horribly… its going to be hilarious if this happens because domainers will be kicking and screaming on the forums and blogs trying to turn back time using the “but people are stupid, they only know .com and dont want to be confused” argument.
good luck with the whole “people are stupid and dont want to learn” outlook. sounds like pretty shakey ground being that people just “learned” the last few years to use mobile devices on the internet – when almost nobody was doing before.
but right, people dont like learning cause they’re dumb. thats my pitch for the future…wish me luck.
Ramahn says
Winner=beatdotla.com
by the way…this is a gimmick site..a gag site…not the Sun’s main page…not by any means anyone’s main page they conduct their business on.
Ah my buddy @interweb so tell me..how much does it cost to run an ad on tv? A billboard? What companies that can afford that cost are going to pay to run tv ad for their product using .la, .xyz, .media, .crap, .whatever?
How many companies on Forbes 500 are going to do this? Which ones?
This is what I and many others when when we say “wishful thinking”. It sounds good that, as long as tv commercials are run over and over using .whatever, people will “learn them”, but WHO is going to pay for these tv ads? And you can forget about radio…ain’t happening.
its not that people are stupid (however we’ve become more “dumbed down” but that’s a different post)….its that people want it simple. Keep it simple!
ontheinterweb says
@Ramahn
its already happening occasionally with .TV, .ME and .CO for example and those are all country codes that were re-purposed (people workin with what they got)… when hundreds of real words are available you do the math. keep in mind we’re not talking about the websites themselves becoming successful.. just peoples exposure to .weird TLD’s and carving the pathway to them being “normal”
it doesnt have to be 100% one way or the other. they will all exist together in harmony… .COM will gain some traffic from peoples old habits, businesses that try .weird might eventually decide to buy the O.G. dotCOM — but many people will still try out other TLD’s and have no interest in the category killer dotcom even for cheap…the world will still be spinning, their business probably will not fail because they didnt have the .com…. if it does, they probably were doing a lot of other things wrong too.
yes that would have been nice if the way were to remain “pay big money for my .COM or remain obscure in peoples minds with your second-tier .net!”
after all these .tld’s come out some people will likely still pay big money for that .com… but some wont and will be perfectly happy using .stupid
Michael says
I think the most likely mistake would be people typing beat.la.com which would leak to la.com, but I’m not sure that would be detectable unless they set up a wild card sub domain to capture the traffic.
Danny Pryor says
Alexa ranks with Compete as among the most unreliable sources of traffic data. Unless they have a direct quantification snippet on each of the domains, which I seriously doubt, you can take any number that Alexa presents with a grain of salt.
LSM says
Show of hands: how many here have the Alexa toolbar installed?
Anybody?
Anybody?
Yeah, me neither.
That’s where their ‘proprietary information’ mostly comes from.
Its probably ‘ok’ for a huge macro snapshot of highly trafficked sites but it is- and I say this with no hyperbole involved- 100% useless to accurately appraise usage stats on smaller websites.
Also, statistically speaking, they claim to normalize their samples but how? There is no question the internet behaviors of any given Alexa toolbar participant will be significantly deviant from the behaviors of John Q Internet.
This question in context:
How many John Q’s would hear offline marketing for beat dot la and mistakenly navigate to beatla dot com?
(X)
How many Alexa toolbar participants are just as likely to make that same internet navigational error as John Q?
Probably something like (X) -90%.
Michael Berkens says
While I would agree that Alexa’s numbers do not consistent correlation to actual numbers of visitors it is an indication of traffic and I have not seen many instances where a site was getting a lot of traffic and not being ranked by Alexa.
Having said that I think the beat.la is getting some significant amount of traffic and beatla.com is not
Andrew Allemann says
Note that in 2010 you wrote about a .info discussed on TV that sent 27,000 visitors to your .com.
In that case people had to do more than click on a link – they had to hear the domain, remember it, and then type it in.
http://www.thedomains.com/2010/03/02/how-much-traffic-can-a-info-site-lose-to-a-com-27000-visitors-in-1-day/comment-page-1/
Michael Berkens says
Andrew that is correct but its now three years later and new gTLD as well as other extension have been in the news a lot.
Its not unusual to see a branded site on a .me or .tv or .io , .co, .Ly extension and with more extensions coming, more stories about extensions like .la and .nyc and .pizza users will adapt and understand more that what they type into the right of the dot is just an important as to the left of the dot.
Tom Gilles says
Additionally, in 2010, the program wasn’t approved. We didn’t know GoDaddy would aggressively promote New gTLDs the way they are. We didn’t know Google would give New gTLDs a full on endorsement with 100 applications. The power Google possesses to change internet user perception has not been thoroughly explored by anyone, I don’t think. I mean, they are out for 5 minutes and web traffic goes down 40%. And they are fully on board with Not.Com website addresses.
Very soon most users will understand very well that the internet does not end with .com. They’ll understand when they see or hear ‘dot-something’, if it doesn’t SAY.com, then it is NOT.com. It’s going to happen a lot faster than anyone thinks.
People are actually pretty bright, and it’s really NOT-COMplicated.
blackcyrus says
In 2008 I advised an association that was using a .info that they absolutely had to have the .com equivalent. They spent a small fortune on it but retained their .info site. It turned out there was practically zero leakage on the website, and just a bit on the email addresses. This particular site attracts a young demographic, so that probably had something to do with it. The combination of QR codes, apps and a flood of new TLDs is going to make a great .com domain about as prestigious as a great Hotmail address.
Grim says
ontheinterweb wrote:
> “anyone who hears “beat.la” and types beatla.com
> is an idiot.”
People _are_ idiots. (Frank Zappa said so.) 😉
LSM says
BlackCyrus, I agree 100% that when generations change, perceptions change and its entirely possible that the change will effect .com.
For now, though, in the big-boy grownup business world, if you’re not on .com, you’re bush league. People don’t realize how much credibility means to a business. I mean real businesses that actually sell stuff or do something or make shit; not vacuous ‘eBusinesses” that are essentially serving nothing other than the boredom of random people.
See what’s at the top of this site?
Zuckerberg just bought internet.org.
Do you know why be went after that name? Because the keyword represented a big idea he had and the suffix gave credibility to his intent. He could’ve certainly bought internet.vc or internet.co or internet.info for considerably less.
Why he went with the .org for that particular project is the same X factor that drives value in .com for commerce.
I have no interest in being 30 years early on some speculation when there’s just too much money to be made here in finite, fully quantifiable reality, right now.
blackcyrus says
LSM, You won’t have to wait 30 years, or even 30 months. It’s true that just about every large corporation uses .com, and that’s how it got its cachet. But very soon many of those same big names – Google, Apple, Walmart, GE, IBM, Target, Johnson & Johnson, CBS, Fox, Macy’s and virtually every major bank and car company – are going to have their sites on a non-dot-com. The very companies that made .com what it is, are not going to be using it anymore.
Some of sites that one might have expected to be .org seem to be doing just fine on .info: http://ewi.info http://mta.info http://alberteinstein.info http://pga.info http://ihf.info http://germany.info http://samsi.info http://ncse.info http://chomsky.info http://ubcf.info http://rothschild.info http://leonardo.info http://iasc.info
The resistance to inevitable change is normal. You can read some of the hilarious predictions by experts who never could have imagined that vinyl records, CDs, video cassettes, fax machines, DVDs, pay phones, the yellow pages and a 60¢ cup of coffee would become either obsolete or special order collectors’ items. Dot-com has been king ever since AOL dial-up was king. But the fact that it will no longer be as ubiquitous as it always was, will make it just another generic TLD. Certainly not obsolete, but not the must-have that it has been.
Grim says
blackcyrus wrote:
> But very soon many of those same big names – Google,
> Apple, Walmart, GE, IBM, Target, Johnson & Johnson,
> CBS, Fox, Macy’s and virtually every major bank and car
> company – are going to have their sites on a non-dot-com.
If this were to happen, you still will be able to go to any of those corporate sites using their .COM names that people have always used to get to them. No site is going to change the extension of their home page, or at least have no way to forward from the .COM to it, if they do so. And most average users won’t notice or care. Getting a gTLD is nothing more than a waste of money in this regard.
Apple only applied for one gTLD… .Apple. Which seems more like a defensive move, if anything. Otherwise, Apple, if they were so excited about the prospects of gTLDs could have easily applied for hundreds… and yet, they don’t seem to care. Not even about .APP.
That speaks volumes, right there.
blackcyrus wrote:
> The resistance to inevitable change is normal. You
> can read some of the hilarious predictions by experts
> who never could have imagined that vinyl records,
> CDs, video cassettes, fax machines, DVDs,
You’re comparing advances and improvements in technology to silly obscure domain extensions? Come on. Try harder next time to come up with something a bit more relevant.
ontheinterweb says
@LSM
wow the big boy grown up world… is that the ride where you jump on and just shut up and die and do what they tell ya?
you know nobody took the internet itself seriously back in the dayo and that people thought it was a fad right… it was the playtime world.
you silly grown ups and your big boy world. i bet you’re all wearing pants right now.
Grim says
@ontheinterweb
> wow the big boy grown up world… is that the ride
> where you jump on and just shut up and die and
> do what they tell ya?
That’s the ‘sucky job’ ride. I only had jobs like that when I was a teenager… the “grownup world” has been way more fun.
@ontheinterweb
> you know nobody took the internet itself seriously
> back in the dayo and that people thought it was a
> fad right… it was the playtime world.
I think you should brush up on your history of the origins of what eventually became the “Internet”, if you really believe that…
@ontheinterweb
> you silly grown ups and your big boy world. i bet
> you’re all wearing pants right now.
Pants? What state / country do you live in where grownups are required to wear pants? (Unless they’re jeans, like Steve Jobs typically wore.) For people who don’t have one of those ‘sucky jobs’ I spoke of earlier, the Bay Area is very casual and doesn’t have a dress code… so stay in school kids, if you’re not a ‘self-taught’ type of person like I was when I quit college to start my first software company back in the early ’80s. Then you can do pretty much whatever you want.
ontheinterweb says
@Grim
my nice cargo shorts and tank top are at the drycleaners now though. san diego is a bit more formal..
and bleh..yes i realize some geeks and people in the know thought the internet was important. i understand the origins and large gaps of time that went by before getting “the internet as we know it today”
because yes, even in the mid 90’s normal people did not take the world wide web seriously… and why should they, there was nothing on it really. planning on starting a business instead of going to college? not even part of the conversation 20 years ago.. way WAY outside the mainstream and not taken seriously…
if you have a different outlook… well, your friends were geeks and/or old enough to appreciate what was happening then. so now all we’re talking about are silly domain extensions, as you point out. it doesnt require people to spend thousands on a machine and $39.99/month internet connection…
i would not put this TLD thing on par with resistance from “CD, cassettes, fax machines, other technology advances” because this isnt technology really. but perception changes and when push comes to shove most domainers will admit “it will take a long time”… to that i say:
@LSM / RE: “I have no interest in being 30 years early on some speculation when there’s just too much money to be made here in finite, fully quantifiable reality, right now.”
you saying you arnt interested in something 30 years out (or however many years) doesnt make time stand still. people say shit like this all the time to pat themselves on the back. cause thats great, make money now.. we’re happy for you but quit saying that like the future isnt going to happen because you’re utilizing the present.
your present is somebody elses future. (queue up the “more you know” shooting star)