My fellow domain Blogger Konstantinos Zournas of OnlineDomain.com cited a poll on his site today in a post entitled: “83% Of Lawyers Not Eager To Get .Lawyer Or .Attorney Domains”
Konstantinos which is doing a great job this year on his blog, seemed to have fallen for a poll whose results are statically fatally faulted.
Konstantinos did not conduct the poll, the poll was conducted by Law Times News but was the basis for Konstantinos post.
If you read some stuff on poll theory (as a Political Science major like 100 years ago, I don’t recommend it unless you have NOTHING else to do) you would soon learn of poll of 66 people out of a group over 1.2 Million has an margin of error of lets of at least 66%, or is basically not worth the virtual paper it is written on.
According to Wikipedia, back in 2011 there were over 1.2 million license attorneys/lawyers in the United States along, and I’m pretty sure that number hasn’t gone down.
So if you ask 66 out of 1.2 Million people anything, I wouldn’t rely on the results too much.
But lets the poll results are accurate.
While 86% of a lawyers are not “eager” to buy, the flip side is that 16.7% of lawyers/attorney are eager to register a domain answering “Yes Its a great tool to get my name out there”.
So as usual the question comes down to is the glass half full or half empty?
If 16.7% of all lawyers answered “Yes Its a great tool to get my name out there”, that would mean out of 1.2 Million attorneys just in the US as of 2011, 200,000 lawyers/attorneys would register a .Lawyer or .Attorney domain.
If those 16.7 that answered “Yes” I want one, only registered one domain, that would make the combined .Attorney/.Lawyer extensions the 2nd largest new gTLD in terms of numbers of registrations; more than 6x the number of .NYC registered domains.
I’m sure the registry operator Rightside (NAME) would be crying the blues of they got only 200,000 registrations for .Attorney and .Lawyer domains at around $40 a domain. After all that is only $8 million dollars a year, not counting any premium domain registrations which there seem to be a bunch.
Consider that no one else applied for .attorney they (Donuts was the actual applicant) got the .attorney registry for the application fee of $185,000.
Just saying.
Ok Michael.
Now tell me how many of those 1.2 Million attorneys are practicing law.
And how many of those that said that might get a .lawyer will actually go and register one?
This is like the millions of pre-registrations that various registrars were claiming before New gTLDs came out.
10%?
So it is more 10% of the 200k lawyers.
The whole point of the poll is that lawyers are not really interested and that is reflected in the .lawyer and .attorney numbers.
We are not doing poll science here.
But if we do then the margin of error in this poll is 12.3% and not 66%.
There are also lawyers outside of the US. You also don’t need to be a lawyer to register a domain of .lawyer or attorny, like you will have to be to register a .law domain.
Sure but again we not trying to figure out how many registrations .lawyer will get but rather the overall feeling towards an extension from the people that the string describes.
If I get 10k .lawyer domains these are the people that I will sell my domains to. (or rather not sell)
I had eSearch.Lawyer but the nameservers did not change after three days so today i deleted it and grabbed http://www.easylawyersearch.com ….kinda happy i did
What do we do when the blogger is the troll?
Berkens’ comment here doesn’t deserve a response. It’s scientifically absurd, and factually wrong. To denegrade statistical sampling is weird, but compounded by interpreting the 16.7% of lawyers who, perhaps have nothing negative to say, as basically people lined up with their wallet to register dotlawyer….
It’s disappointing to see Berkens doing this type of editorial still.
That’s it! I’ve canceled my subscription to the Sherpa show.
Domen READ the questions that were asked in the crappy poll, the two choices given.
To be clear what 16.7% of the people who answered the poll selected “Yes Its a great tool to get my name out there”, how do you then get to well they just had nothing to say.
I have never seen a valid poll that says “no opinion, not sure or never heard about it, making the poll more ridiculous.
@Berkens,
If you say that a Space Shuttle is a great way to get you to the moon, doesn’t mean you automatically ordered one; NASA would be faulted if they delivered one to your door because you made that statement.
To leap from “Yes it’s a great tool to get my name out there”, to “Yes I want one”, is probably the MOST cunning I’ve EVER seen! And I believe its deliberate.
@berkins…
You are completely wrong here. I agree with KZ. I think he is correct on this issue. The gtlds are dying a squeamish
death already and you are sorry to see it happen, but you need to call a spade a spade. The gtlds suck but this should not surprise anyone on team Schwartz who called this from the get go. You owe both KZ and your readers an apology. The more you defend gtlds the worse you’re gonna look when they all go under for the very reasons he brought up.
I didn’t say that “The gtlds are dying a squeamish death” or something similar but certain New gTLDs are having problems. Especially when there are so many alternatives and with certain occupations.
K-
It doesn’t matter what you said about the new gTLD program in general or what your thoughts are you are entitled to your opinion, my post was about the one post you made yesterday about a poll that had 66 responses.
So? I don’t really understand your post. You said that 66 responses are not enough and that it had a 66% margin of error and that was not correct. It is 12.3%.
Actually the reply above was not to you or your post. It was to qwerty.
Mike, I agree with Konstantinos in that the gtlds are just not in demand, not by lawyers, not by domainers and certainly not by end users. Only a matter of time before many gtld registries start to pack up and close shop. It is happening faster than many predicted too. The smell of gtld death is permeating the net and the loss of millions of dollars loom. Sorry you were on the wrong end of the table on this one. Better luck next time.
I actually think .NYC is very promising. To date it is my favorite launched new GTLD.
I think it will get municipal support and in order for a GTLD to be successful will need that level of broad stakeholder involvement.
wow didn’t show my comment ?
KZ
To be clear I said that a poll with 66 responses with a population basis of 1.2 Million is not valid period.
The 66% factor came from the link I cited which if you read the entire story really mean its 100% unreliable.
There wasn’t even a choice for no/opinion/don’t know.
In a recent poll on ebola over 10% of the general population had no opinion/don’t know
Every “real” poll has to have the option
That was the point of the story
66 responses is not a poll where there are over 1.2 million in the group that is suppose to be represented in the poll in this case attorney/lawyers is meaningless
Polling 101
Sure it is a small sample but the poll is not 100% unreliable.
Michael you have your numbers wrong. There is no 66%. Where did you get that?
It is 1 divided by the square root of 66: 12.3%
That is not optimal but not 100% unreliable as you state.
Go Zournas!
This feels strange on so many levels. lol
Thanks.
Seems this point could have been made by just criticising the poll rather than trying to put the boot into a fellow blogger, which feels fairly unnecessary and rather juvenile.
Its the fellow domain blogger that picked up the poll and published it and took the results seriously.
I have the boot kicked into me quite a few times by fellow bloggers over the years, part of the joy of blogging
100% of domainers agree to disagree.
Acro
As is always the case
KZ
Yes a poll of 66 out of 1.2 million is totally inaccurate is no better than a poll we run on thedomains or other bloggers run, actually less accurate
As I said if you think it has some accuracy then the flipside is its great news for .attorney or .lawyer which would give them 200,000 registrations so it can be a negative story as you wrote it or a positive story if you flip the numbers around.
I really did take a lot of political science classes in College and we spent a lot of time on polling and the accuracy of the results of polls so you either have to trust me that the sample is WAY to small
You would went to the ABA conference and asked 1,500 attorney/lawyers about this as long as the question and answers presented in a fair and balanced manner that would be a poll and the results would have some cred.
But a certain portion will have no opinion/ no knowledge of it.
The choice here was not its a horrible money grab and not yes I’m really excited.
If you took the classes then you will know that is also how you pick the sample, how you state the questions etc. But I said this is not poll science. This is a trend.
Even an ABA conference would not be an accurate poll because then you would be polling only the ones that go to a conference that could be very different from the 1.2M lawyer population.
The people that saw the poll had the option of not voting so that would be the “no opinion/ no knowledge”. Sure, we don’t know the % for that but that could also be irrelevant.
The other problem is that you just can’t assume that the 200k lawyers will go out and actually buy a domain. Most of them will simply forget it or will not actually register one because they simply don’t need it, or they will choose something else. Being excited of having an extra option is not the same as actually using and >paying< for the option. Because it is the people that said yes the ones that are going to have to act. The others said no and that is it.
Exactly. It’s no different from asking a bunch of ambulance chasers if they thought that putting their firms on neon signs on the freeway is a good way to attract name recognition, and some of them answer in the affirmative. But then, a follow up is necessary to ascertain if they would actually buy the space, for how much, when, and under what condition, before a leap is made.
Besides, we know how many is interested in rigging the dot lawyer right now, just take a look at the root zone files, then deduct 100% of the number therein, for all of them were rugged by insiders, domainers, and proxies! So the answer is likely ZERO.
This stuff is not in the abstract.
I have a poll of my own… i asked 5 of my lawyer buddies if they would like thier name/firm .lawyer and after asking how much all agreed it made sense and were going to grab thiers.
100 percent of all 5
KZ
I’m not assuming anything based off that poll, its worthless.
So now 200,000 domains will not be registered by the 16.7 % or but if you think its valid then the reverse has to be valid too and the reverse questions wasn’t would you consider registering a .attorney/.lawyer domain?
It was YES I’m excited that was cast by a whopping 11 people that would lead you to the 200K number
The 200K number is bullshit
The 86% number is bullshit
The poll is bullshit
Lets move on
D
It is bullshit as a scientific poll.
It is fine for a post in a blog.
At least correct your mistake: the margin of error is not not 66%. It is 12.3%.