That's another argument - active domains versus domains merely in the zonefile.
At a guess, the ccTLD count would be over 20M. That does not exceed .com and the gTLDs but it is significant.
The Verisign Domain Industry Brief tends to be useful for general trends. Apart from that it is necessary to collect stats from the individual ccTLD registries. http://www.verisign.com/static/043939.pdf
It is a theory based on facts, data and observation rather than opinion.
Strange as it may sound, both. The .com has global recognition but over the last few years, the ccTLDs are catching up in their own markets. This change is slow but the figures are there. The hard part is breaking down the .com and gTLD registrations on a country basis.
The real competition for .com is not these wannabe TLDs but rather the ccTLDs. As the country markets mature, there is greater emphasis on the ccTLD. This trend is what people are missing because they think in purely dot com terms.
Try .com vs any CCTLD...the growth of com has been significant the past few years. Stronger than any other TLD or CCTLD.
On what facts do you stand to say that CCTLD are growing at a faster pace than dot com? While CCTLD are of course growing....it's not nearly at the same rate.
The trend is clear to me. The more TLD's the stronger dot com gets.
All the discussion about ICANN opening up TLD's and how CCTLDs are the future is mostly nonsense. They are small players in a growing GLOBAL market. Do you think that the world is becoming one giant marketplace? Because if you do...then dot com makes perfect sense to be the market leader. Companies for the most part will continue to use dot com for their online presence. Yes companies such as Sony do have sony.co.jp but where do they have their internation global presence? It's Sony.net actually. It's not a CCTLD.
You presented some of them yourself in the link to the .kr registry - the growth of ccTLDs.
I'll post some stats later tonight.
No. All that Google Trends displays is the search volume queries for various terms but without any numerical indication of the volumes. The .com vs .fr, .com vs .de and .com vs .ie are interesting trends especially when you limit the queries to their target markets of France, Germany and Ireland respectively. Without those crucial numbers, the Google Trends graphs don't apply to domain registations figures. They apply to search volume on particular queries - two different things.
I am aware of how significant the growth of .com and the other TLDs have been since I use the zonefiles to generate the stats. You are not comparing like with like and that is where we differ. I am talking about ccTLD growth as compared to .com growth in those ccTLDs. You are talking about .com growth as a whole.
I'm not sure if you are misunderstanding the argument on purpose. But some ccTLDs are growing faster in their countries than .com registrations.
The ccTLDs have an awful lot of growing left to do. The .com is a mature extension and its global nature is maintaining a lot of its growth.
I think that the world is still a set of marketplaces and will continue to be a set of marketplaces for the immediate future. Treating the world as a single, global, market for business purposes is naive.
So tell me again why Google places so much emphasis on ccTLDs. And why does Sony tend to use ccTLDs when selling to country level markets? The domain business is not just domainers. Companies and businesses use domains to target specific markets and ccTLDs are, more than , .com or the gTLDs, effective in targeting those markets. As I said earlier, ccTLDs are growing and will continue to grow. In some countries, the ccTLD will become more important for that country than the .com and gTLDs. In some countries such as Germany and the UK, the ccTLD dominates the market and .com is second to the ccTLDs.
Sony's .eu points to its sony-europe.com portal and that allows users to select the relevent Sony ccTLD site:
You'd better invest in some Ketchup, my good friend.
Why? Because it's a Marketing Match made in Heaven, that's why.
NBC would NEVER, EVER have to worry about cyber squatters again. It's like the 3D VISA % MC logos on your credit cards, Man. If it's not .NBC brother, it's not the real deal.
It's the stamp of authenticity. It's proof of the real McCoy. The .com is the place holder now, .NBC is where the action is.
It's ENDLESS.... Whatever they will think of, WHEVER they get around to thinking of it... they've got the domain. They don't have to search, or buy, or employ a lawyer or fight with anyone.
Just build it, advertise it and drive traffic to it.
Look at all the CRAZY domains being used by TV and Movie promoters now. Why in the world would they be using 4 and 5 word domains with abstract meanings to market their Multi-Million Dollar productions if they had ANY inclination to by the proper .com?
Because they BELIEVE in marketing and driving traffic to where they want it to go. It's INGRAINED in them. It's marketing 101, Brother!
"If you build it, they will come" is only the Domainer's prayer. Big Business subscribes to "Market, Market, Market, Market... and they will come"
NBC is going to market their programs anyway... exactly HOW MUCH MONEY does it take for them to simply say "Dateline.NBC... the new place for NEWS" or "SNL.NBC... the New Place for Laughs" or Jay Leno to say "LateNight.NBC... the new place for Leno"
They do stuff like that anyway. They simply need to change their message and BAM... they've branded their new domain and ensured a trouble free future for... well, forever.
I tell you what, there are some Marketing Execs that are going to make a TON of money in selling these new extensions to business. The gold rush is on, and I'm sad to say that we domainers are not invited.
I'm not saying .com is completely DEAD, I'm just saying that the BIG money buyers/end users have been given and option that greatly reduces the .com value.
I'm also suggesting that NOW, more than ever, is the time for the Domaining community to find a way to meet traditional marketing in a place they recognize and stop trying to get them to think "our" way about domains.
Because like them, we have an educational curve to deal with. We need to teach them how to come to us just as they are teaching the viewing public how to come to them.
In their world, "generic" has less value and the sooner we realize that, the sooner our worlds might come together for mutual growth.
I dont think it will be the end. Domaining will be around for a long time in my opinion. But these new extensions will certainly have an impact on the domain industry.
If a company is brandable and is developed properly with venture funding and not some crappy developed page that a domainer makes then the extension doesnt matter and .com becomes irrelevant. Do you think Craigslist.org, Del.icio.us and Last.fm are worthless? The people who developed on those domains are worth $100 million or more now. Is one of your developed .coms worth more? It seems like brandable domains which are developed are the ones worth all the money, not the generic ones as much. That means that generic .com domain values might not be worth much in the future too. Which is worth more generic SearchEngine.com or Google.com? Videos.com or YouTube.com?
If the day comes when I can simply create my own extension for the same as today's registration fee then we will see the end of .com
A great system would be for me to be able to create a domain name with an extension quickly and easily which is relevant to my business and local area. (e.g. webdesign.exeter)
Personally, I think this would be a great solution as it would give more choice to businesses, and crate more memorable domain names for visitors.
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“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” - Adam Smith
And yet once again you provide no evidence of this trend.
Right..that's where the 5% comes in...forget did you? I am pretty sure in Germany that .de registrations outnumber .com but so what...that's a small portion of the overall internet. It's also the exception not the rule.
Looking forward to it. I am always happen to see proof in a discussion.
Now that's a very valid point. It's a good perspective. I can certainly see that take on it. I am just still not convinced companies overall will take the steps needed. Also will ICANN allow extensions that are closed off to public registration? That imho is a good question since opening up the extension rules imho is to allow greater public access. We shall see.
I was absolutely sure that someone would bring those sites up.
Craigslist.com
Delicious.com
Last.fm <- the only one not to have a CNO. Again an exception not the rule.
You forgot one too...wikipedia.org but again...they have the .com version too.
What's your point? Seems out of the scope of this discussion. We are discussion the new TLD rules by ICANN and how it might effect dot com values. If you are trying to convince people that Generics won't be valuable because brandables will be the hot-ticket then maybe you need to have a look at dnjournals weekly sales chart. The vast majority are generics and acronyms with a small mixture of brandables in the $x,xxx range. I respect greatly brandables for future prospects but I am not convinced they will ever be worth the $xx,xxx range.
You can't compare COM to Google. It sounds nice, but it isn't accurate. People go to Google because it is the best Search Engine. People go to COM out of habit. Choice versus ignorance. That's not the same thing.
You also can't compare ccTLDs to gTLDS. You are right, IM doesn't effect COM at all. Neither does DE, the second most popular domain. That's because IM, like DE are ccTLDs and COM is a gTLD. I bet you wouldn't say that NET & ORG do not effect COM. If you have a COM and somebody developes an ORG or NET with the same name, it usually makes the COM counterpart traffic go up. More traffic means more value. That's really obvious, isn't it? [Example: I bet Archive.com gets a lot of bleed over traffic from Archive.org. True or False? Archive.com is more valuable because Archive.org is one of the top 2000 sites in the world.]
Do you really believe this line that you wrote NameTrader: "I personally think this is ICANN's way to incite stupid unknowledged companies and investors to throw their money away." Isn't that kind of a crazy theory? Why would ICANN do that? [Elvis was captured by spacemen, too. ] Your .IM example doesn't provide proof of anything except of people not understanding what they were buying. The Isle of Man had a right to have a domain extension. ICANN provided them with .IM. It had nothing to do with greed. It had nothing to do with domaining either. Nobody told domainers to buy .IM and put crappy parking pages there.
Some of these countries have transnational registrars hosted and this tends to drive up the numbers of CNOBI domains. However strong ccTLDs do exist beside CNOBI registrations and in some cases, there are more ccTLDs than CNOBI domains.
This is a more closely tracked set of figures for .ie (Ireland) Versus Irish hosted gTLDs:
Far from .de being the exception to your rule, its ccTLD dominance model is actually more common than you think. Some of these countries are more advanced in terms of connectivity and as such when that happens, the ccTLDs grow rapidly. Where internet connectivity is not so good, many of those countries' gTLD domains will be hosted outside of the IP ranges of those countries, typically in the US or Canada. The registration and hosting business tends to follow a particular track in that when there is a significant development of connectivity in a country that country's non-locally hosted domains will move back. In a mature ccTLD market, over 80% of that country's domains will be hosted locally.
I just hope that the true reason of the "boycott" is to truly dispute the junk extension because one thing domainers lack is banding together BEFORE the sale.
There are no junky extensions, just junky domains and some of us have allowed our online friends to register total rubbish. As a result, deep down I'm think domainers are scared of other extensions because the domaining business will lose it's integrity and be over-saturated with junky domains. NewsFlash: it already is IMO.
ICANN is a business and it needs to make more profit here lately and since when does ICANN gave a care about the public opinion? That hits a nerve but look at an enduser POV when they try to register the lamest domain and they see UNAVAILABLE UNAVAILABLE UNAVAILABLE
Go with the flow and spend this time preparing ways to have a leg-up on the competition instead.
Bottom line is we all make money from speculation. ICANN sees it's opportunity and will run with it.
Competition and change are bound to happen and the average domainer is too resilient.
Unfortunately if new extensions come out the only people benefiting will be the people selling the extensions IMO, the companies that put up the minimum $100,000 to get a foot in, not you, not I, not a bunch of newbie domainers either. This same sentiment has been expressed by namepros user estibot.com and also by Domain Name tycoon Rick latona on one of his latest blog posts. Rick Latona is even going to be on the serving end of the domain name extensions making a partnership to buy some extensions next year, but Rick Latona expressed that domainers on the buying end will be getting a dud deal. This has also been my sentiment all along, or this boycott thread would not have been started in the first place.
Personally, I think an overwhelming majority that try to release a new novelty domain name extension are going to fall flat on their faces, seriously and when they do, I wouldn't want to be holding any domain names in their extensions either. Trademarked names like .ibm .cnn .msn and city geo domains aside of course, I have little problem with trademarked and geo extensions myself personally. I have a lot of issue with future novelty domains though like: .cool, .fun, .travel .shop .jobs .film .name .trash .biz .dontbeasucker .pro .cars etc
Last edited by raredn.com : 07-10-2008 at 06:36 PM.
I see what you mean. Where ever there are big profits to be made, implosion is likely. The internet is very young and this in inevitable. If it doesn't happen now, it will happen later. We all want to sell that million dollar domain before the domain name business implodes.
Your quote get me to thinking about how this will effect advertising and consumer loyalty. How will we all fit in Google's top ONE HUNDRED for our keywords? How do I pick the best site for a cell phone out of THOUSANDS? I can hear my mom saying, "What's their website? .cool? wth?"
On a serious note. thanks for the clarification of your view. People who know nothing about the internet except for checking email have absolutely no clue and ICANN is acting like everyone is a domainer when we're just a fraction of the world's population. How much damage can a fraction do?
anyone have the static of DOT com VS cctld Park site static/ratio ???
I heard there is a lot value for dot com but most (ratio/percentage) generic/brand/keyword domain in dot com is PARK site compare with cctld (develop)....
] Your .IM example doesn't provide proof of anything except of people not understanding what they were buying. The Isle of Man had a right to have a domain extension. ICANN provided them with .IM. It had nothing to do with greed. It had nothing to do with domaining either. Nobody told domainers to buy .IM and put crappy parking pages there.
