Inc.com just published a post, entitled “Will New Top Level Domains Matter in 2015? Will new URL endings change web design and marketing in 2015?”
The Inc.com story is about as negative on new gTLD’s as I read recently and pretty much the opposite of Paul Stahura recent post on Circleid.com
“”In 2014, the new Top Level Domains (TLDs) were introduced to much fanfare from the press and tech bloggers. New web address endings were touted as a land rush on the internet and a game changer for marketing strategies. Despite such pronouncements, new TLDs were largely ignored in 2014, leaving some to expect an explosion in activity in 2015. However, before business owners run off to build new sites with fancy new names, it’s important to separate fact from fiction regarding TLDs and to ask the question, “Will the new TLDs matter to marketers and consumers in 2015?”.””
“”The sheer amount of TLDs available also undermines one of the reasons some thought they would be so popular. When there so many TLDs to choose from, it’s not as effective for squatters to try and wrap of domains with the intent of selling them later. It’s not the same as in the early days of the internet. Back then, if someone had the .com you wanted, there was nothing you can do but pay them or get a different name. Now, marketers can just move to a different TLD. The introduction of these new TLDs have created so much internet real estate, it’s impractical for one person to try to lock up domains they don’t intend to use.””
You can read the whole Inc.com story here
People already know, it’s been said I don’t know how many times and ways before, but I’ll say it anyway: .com is synonymous with the Web in people’s minds. ccTLD’s come a distant second overall, do they not? Perhaps .net in very rare specific cases. Rather than look for game changing developments in the new gTLD’s here in the US, I recommend considering the still untapped value of .US itself. Unsolicited attention and buy offers have been quietly rising in recent years. Even sold one not long ago for mid $x,xxx from one such unsolicited offer. All if would take to propel .US into people’s consciousness is just a little bit of promotion by one of the big players, yes?
Of course Paul Stahura was happy to post on a .com blog ,whilst knocking .com . I saw the following quote today;
“..with the announcement of its new domain name QNB .com …….Whilst highlighting the reputational significance of the new website name change, QNB is keen to point out that customers will not be impacted by the new developments, and the old website address http://www.qnb.com.qa will continue to operate. ” End Quote
For now .com will remain THE tld to have, but who knows 5 years from now maybe something will become more popular.
P.S. Recently also had $xx,xxx offers on another .US inquired about unsolicited as well, agreed to the last, though the deal is currently in limbo and the buyer was last reported to be dealing with second thoughts. Perhaps it’ll come to fruition later, though.
My takeaway from this article is that as far as Google goes the extension doesn’t matter~ if you own the” category killer” re insurance etc etc
That is certainly part of the story – no advantage for new gTLD’s – but the author also spends considerable time on their disadvantages:
“In fact, having a vanity TLD immediately indicates that this a new site which puts the site at a disadvantage when compared to sites that have been serving customers from a .com web address for years. This is why older alternative TLDs like .biz or .info never really took off.”
“Given the challenges facing TLD adoption, it’s unlikely that TLDs will make a huge marketing impact in 2015 unless there is some sort of game changing development. If you want to use one of the new TLDs to build a site with an easy-to-remember name, you won’t be disappointed, but don’t expect new domain endings to perform some kind of marketing magic in the coming year.”
That’s exactly why if you own a new TLD it really has to be the exact match category killer word~ Loans~ Insurance~ Restaurants etc
Well I certainly like the idea of having the category killer term for any TLD, but they are still at quite a large overall disadvantage compared to the .com, even if not strictly a technical disadvantage related to only search. And when it comes to human behavior, you can be quite confident that when people are actually searching on topics like “loans,” for example, they are going to frequently be searching for “loans.com” itself and variants like “loans .com” and “www.loans .com” (note the spaces in the latter two), etc., not to mention type-ins that still occur. Not only for short one word topics, but also even for long chains of words, including even four-word topics. Before Google stopped allowing the search string to appear in your traffic stats, this kind of reality was most definitely evident even for very long multi-word phrases. The .US I received $xx,xxx offers on recently is a two-word domain, so I did also reg it in one of the new gTLD’s just in case for the time being, but could have easily let it remain unregged.
When have any of these mainstream media asshat EVER been right about the macro level aspects of the domain space?
Ambition and the pursuit of opportunties drive demand. New GTLDs are a fertile ground for Opportunists.
I avoid listening to people who get paid to have opinions and write about things they are no engaged in.
The problem with the media is that a lot of the people giving their opinions have no detailed knowledge of the field. There’s a kind of dotCOMmunist view of the new gTLDs that claims that all new gTLDs are bad and only .COM is the one true TLD. The problem with that simplification is that it completely ignores the rise of the ccTLDs and how the ccTLDs are moving towards dominance in their local markets at the expense of .COM TLD. In some countries, .COM is on the way to becoming a legacy TLD. The curious thing is that some of the new gTLDs are beginning to develop along ccTLD lines in that they are building communities around the gTLD. Growth patterns in ccTLDs also tend to be slow initially. The new gTLDs are quite different from the well marketed individual TLD launches of the last few years like .CO ccTLD, .MOBI and .EU ccTLD. These were massively marketed and launched without having any other competing TLDs launching in the same timeframe. The new gTLDs do not have this benefit.
The other aspect of the new gTLDs versus the .COM TLD argument is that .COM really is a set of country level markets and a smaller global market. Most people, including the media and, to some extent, domain investors do not seem to understand that simple fact. Most of the new gTLDs have been largely US/Canadian events. Most have not even gone through the first year of operation and the media seems to think that the domain name market runs simply on calendar years with nice clean end of year renewals. The new gTLDs have, typically, yet to gain market awareness and end-user acceptance. That last part is the key. It is not just domain investors that make a success of a a TLD. It is the end-users, and some of them might be domain investors, who develop websites and use the TLD. Domain investors are only part of the wider TLD ecosystem.
“ccTLDs are moving towards dominance in their local markets at the expense of .COM TLD.”
Based on my daily checking of new Internet startups reported on Techcrunch, I see the opposite, that most Internet startups, regardless of where they are located geographically, aspire to become global companies and so choose .com for their website if they can afford. Here are just a couple of startups I picked up from today’s Techcrunch:
Ukraine | Branto | smart home hub | mybranto.com
UK | Clowdy | LinkedIn for creatives | clowdy.com
UK | Coadec | startup industry | coadec.com
France | Idinvest Partners | vc | idinvest.com
China | Net Dragon | game development | netdragon.com
India | Common Floor | real estate | commonfloor.com
UK | White Star Capital | vc | whitestarvc.com
Germany | eZelleron | energy generation | eZelleron.com
By its own nature, Internet is global and as we have seen time and time again small Internet startups rise up to become giants, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. In the Internet era, Internet firms will become the leaders in the business world. In every country, their future business leaders are Internet firms. If Internet firms in every country are adopting .com, will they not lead to wide adoption of .com within their business community. (Note that my discussion is only limited to the business world, because of the natural aspiration of every business to become global.)
John, you work with a lot of registration data, so I’m sure you know something that I don’t know. Can you explain how you arrive at the conclusion?
Internet startups with a global market are a very small part of any country’s domain footprint, KC,
Most of the online business in any mature country level market will be overwhelmingly within that country and will generally use the local ccTLD because its customers will expect it to have a local ccTLD domain name. Techcrunch doesn’t cover the local shop website or the local pub’s website. With Germany, the .DE ccTLD has over 15M registrations but there are far less gTLD registrations associated with the country. With the UK, the local ccTLD is .UK and it has over 10M registrations. The numbers of gTLD domains hosted on UK hosters is much less than that.
In these mature country level markets, the .COM/ccTLD axis will occupy approximately 80% to 85% of the country’s domain name footprint. In an early market, the .COM percentage will be higher than the ccTLD as the ccTLD will have to gain acceptance. As the market develops and more ordinary businesses (local) begin to use the ccTLD as their main identity and the growth in .COM registrations slowly falls. Most businesses with a .COM will continue to use it or will redirect the .COM to the .ccTLD website. But once the ccTLD gains local acceptance, the market cascades towards ccTLD dominance. It also shifts from being market favouring generic domain names to a market where specific domain names (brands) become dominant.
The natural aspirations of most businesses in a local market is to thrive and survive. These are the Mom and Pop businesses rather than the internet startups with global ambitions. Some of these businesses will appear early in the market but as the market develops and the ccTLD becomes more accepted, many of these will just register their brand in the local ccTLD and .COM. After a while, these new localised businesses will just register in the local ccTLD and not in any other TLD. This is actually a very interesting trend. Some ccTLDs will have a “uniqueness” percentage of approximately 15%. This is where about 15% of the domains in that ccTLD will not be registered in the gTLDs. There are other factors such as language and its distance from English but it is an indication of general patterns. As the market matures, this percentage increases. But that increasing uniqueness demonstrates a shift from the generic to the specific.
The .COM is a great generic TLD but it is not so great when the registrant wants to show a local affiliation or that it operates in a specific country or town (it generally has to use a country or location as part of its domain name). Thus in .COM, there is a lot of generic domain names and these are highly valued. But there are also many specific domain names that are unique to the registrant or the registrant’s business. With ccTLDs, this shift from generic to specific is even more pronounced. The ccTLD’s country provides the location (something that doesn’t happen in .COM) and the left of the dot provides the brand or trading name. This shift from the early market generic towards the mature market specific happens as the ccTLD becomes widely accepted and dominant in its local market.
The problem with a lot of the coverage in the tech media is that it is typically written by people who don’t have any experience of knowledge of the world outside of .COM TLD. The .COM is actually a set of local markets and a smaller global market. The TLD has been around for decades and many of the domain names in the TLD have been registered for years. However the TLD has the volume of new registrations to keep it in position as the largest TLD. But the ccTLDs have been growing rapidly over the last decade too. As they grow in their local markets, they replace .COM as the first choice TLD. Even more worrying, much of the growth in .COM over the last few years has been driven by discounting and its one year registration and their subsequent renewal rate has been falling. These one year wonders (domain names registered for a year and then dropped without renewal) are increasing. Much of this is down to discounting, couponing and special offers. Without that discounting element, .COM would not have grown so quickly. There is a wider consolidation trend in the gTLD market and it is not caused by the new gTLDs. For those of us who work with the registration data, it is slightly unsettling because .COM is not immune to the trend.
Thank you for sharing your perspective with detailed explanation.
Based on the number of comments and the fact that the Inc website crashes my browser after a short while from all the ads, I don’t think many people will be reading the article.
Thank you for giving us a precious information on the TLD i never got this thingie in this deep.