Dot Net Crashes through 6M

[Rubber Duck]

Why is domain parking a booming business? Because people type "whatevername.com"
The leftover traffic from other TLD's is only a side-effect, e.g. previously active and expired domains, viral marketing etc.

Depends on how discriminating your marketing is. Most of my leads come from search engine searches rather than from type-in. The sort of people that I am trying to sell to aren't buying cds or looking for loans. I used to run a site on a dot com extension but realised that the keywords were not optimal, I have done much better since I changed the URL even though I would have preferred the new keywords with a dot com extension. I personally believe that researching the right keywords and optimising the site for searching is much more important than the extension.

I am advertising professional services. If, however, you are mass marketing consumer products of course the situation changes dramatically.


Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

well it seems we do agree.
what I am saying is:
when the viable options are exhausted (all .com variations that dont have 3 hyphes and arent 30 chars long are taken), I go for a nice keyword other extension.
then i develop.
but then again, I may be wrong.
I guess archive.org is losing soooooo much traffic to archive.com
lol

and thats just 1 example.
I agree .com is king.
but If I cant get the king, I'll settle for the queen, the knight, the prince, and the princes

Lot of contradiction in this statement, but I agree a high profile site like archive.org could be losing a lot of traffic. Just goes to show that if you have a major brand, you should cover all the angles.

I have to admit my success with traffic has been limited, but you can always sell a domain with good keywords and even if they fetch less than the dot com at least they are reasonably easy to get in the first place. I have had reasonable success registering dot net drops when dot info, dot biz and dot us are already gone. Never headline stuff but you can usually get 5 to 10 what you pay for them, although the market gets tougher all the time.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

That I don`t agree.
If I can`t get the .com I wanted - I would go for the next .com, not .net etc etc

If you are just looking for traffic then obviously there will be a tendency to stick with dot com, as we know that most type ins are dot com. If you are looking for keyword searches, compromising on specific keywords may be more damaging than compromising on the extension.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[Leading Names]

I think people often blow this "loosing traffic to the .com" theory out of proportion.

1. Only 10-15% of type-in traffic is lost, for small sites where the majority of traffic derives from search engines, links, bookmarks and sponsored ads it matters very little whether the site is on a .com, .biz, .us, .cc or whatever.

2. People aren't stupid, that 10-15% figure is sure to dwindle as people become more clued up about alternative extensions (public recognition of extensions such as .info, .biz etc is growing as each month passes).

3. Traffic loss to alternative extensions isn't the only form of traffic loss, the person who owns the .com probably losses a similar amount of traffic to typos of his name. If you use an alternative extension the chances of you being able to register different variants and typos of your name is far higher than if you owned the .com counterpart, which in most cases are already registered.

4. That 10-15% figure is only true when you compare like with like e.g. loan.com with loan.biz and not buy-great-loans-today.com with loans.biz etc. The chances of you picking up a short, memorable, generic, name in an alternative extension is quite high, the chances of you picking up a short, memorable, generic .com without paying a kings random is very slim.

- Rob

 

[Rubber Duck]

I think people often blow this "loosing traffic to the .com" theory out of proportion.

1. Only 10-15% of type-in traffic is lost, for small sites where the majority of traffic derives from search engines, links, bookmarks and sponsored ads it matters very little whether the site is on a .com, .biz, .us, .cc or whatever.

2. People aren't stupid, that 10-15% figure is sure to dwindle as people become more clued up about alternative extensions (public recognition of extensions such as .info, .biz etc is growing as each month passes).

3. Traffic loss to alternative extensions isn't the only form of traffic loss, the person who owns the .com probably losses a similar amount of traffic to typos of his name. If you use an alternative extension the chances of you being able to register different variants and typos of your name is far higher than if you owned the .com counterpart, which in most cases are already registered.

4. That 10-15% figure is only true when you compare like with like e.g. loan.com with loan.biz and not buy-great-loans-today.com with loans.biz etc. The chances of you picking up a short, memorable, generic, name in an alternative extension is quite high, the chances of you picking up a short, memorable, generic .com without paying a kings random is very slim.

- Rob

Rob,

I agree! Type-in is probably largely derived from unsophisticated users. As most people in the US become more conversant with the internet, my guess is that it will gradually dwindle as more people use search engines as their home page and type in keywords rather than messing about typing into the address bar, which is a very crude and ineffective way of accessing information and useful sites. For example if you are looking for books, you end up with Barnes and Noble, wheras typing "books" into Google will immediately give you the market leader Amazon. If you are researching specific information, the situation is even more clear. Typing several keywords into Google will give you a number of site with relevant information, wheras trying to type multiple keywords into the address bar is largely a waste of time.

Sedo appreciate this, so they advertise their domains on Google, which actually developes traffic on parked domains and enables traffic to be directed more effectively.

Search and Search Engine Optimisation is the future of advertising, as this will, in the longer term, not only produce more traffic, but better targeted quality traffic which is more valuable to advertisers and as it will produce a higher conversion into sales. Furthermore, the reason that end users will pay such high prices for domains, is that they don't want to keep coughing up for ever more expensive type-in traffic. They want to capture a supply of traffic that they actually own and control.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[britishbulldog]

Agree i use google as my home page and other people are tending to the same if not at least a toolbar,Yep i still say keywords is the way to go considering a search engine does not discriminate against the extension,on that scenario im surprised other tlds are so cheap compared to the .com unless you are of course lauching a advertising campain,otherwise loans.ws is better than XX.com if you are relying on search engines and 10,000 times cheaper.

By the way i still prefer .com as i can do both the above ! the day when the engines do discriminate is when .com and .net will make many a millionaire and kills every other extension apart from key country extensions dead.

You think icann are powerful nothing compared to the search enginers they could make or break you overnight if they decide the extension is relevant !

Maybe im right or wrong who knows im yet to be convinced either way !

 

[sevent]

Pop Quiz:

You're Verisign and you can start changing whatever you want for the gTLD. You can do 20 Million dot coms year at $6 profit each, or jack up your prices to $100 and do a mere 10 Million (or even just 5 million) names a year. Do the math. Now what to you do? What do you do? :-D

Except economic fundamentals. The reason a lot of us are not keen on ccTLDs is that in comparison to dot com they are so bloody expensive.

If verisign start charging $50 dollars then even dot jp starts to look cheap. Dot US would certainly take off and even dot biz might come off life support!

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[Mr. Deleted]

that would kill 15 MILLION urls, and make the search engines even more powerful.

BTW, if you are so afraid about it, go renew them all for 10 years now, and then no worries!

 

[Rubber Duck]

that would kill 15 MILLION urls, and make the search engines even more powerful.

BTW, if you are so afraid about it, go renew them all for 10 years now, and then no worries!

Actually, Network Solutions will give you a really good deal on 100 years! LOL

 

[Mr. Deleted]

100 X 150 names X $100 per name ??? That would be $1,500,000

 

[mole]

The days of curious type-ins are numbered, imho. You buy a name for its branding/mindshare value, not some untargeted milk the traffic crap.

Not only is the Internet evolving new and better ways to navigate content i.e. semantic web, contextual/vertical search, better directory portals, but new namespace is set to explode in awareness especially with the flood of new extensions like .XXX and .EU and .MOBI (Nokia/Microsoft).

This .COM leak traffic argument is starting to smell like a wooly mammoth that needs a bath.

 

[Mr. Deleted]

I like some of of the new extentions, as I parked a few on GK and one .org that I had for a few years now, get optimized to make xx.xx in one day, and so it just goes that if you do the SEO, the .orgs and .bizs can make it in todays world too.