Yeah, but EU is also having economic problems and uncertainty about the 'brand' or collaboration itself. How do you know you've pegged the correct factors as causal?
I do. Eurid, the .eu registry does a little 5000 domain survey of website usage every now and then. The last .eu web usage survey that I did covered 2 million .eu domains. In terms of development, .eu is very much like .biz and the non-core TLDs. It is dead in the English speaking areas of Europe. It has a high (not as high as .co or .mobi) level of PPC parking and holding pages. It is a gateway TLD that is used by EU businesses and large brands for redirecting users to the relevant ccTLD website. It is very far from the .com competitor that it was intended to be when it was proposed. What is very odd about .eu is that Greece has had a largely stable level of .eu registrations.
What's the troubling trend you see with .CO?
A lack of development and widespread usage. COinternet used some utterly bogus figures based on flawed methodology and classifications to claim that web usage was high in the ccTLD. It was not.
Any new TLD has a very limited window in which to get development, and subsequently usage, kickstarted. With .com, there was no real competition. The problem with .pro was that it was proposed and launched in a .com only market. This meant that the logic of a TLD for the professions was sound. However the rise of the ccTLDs meant that it was important for a professional targeting a specific market to use the local ccTLD - it identified the professional as being local. The repurposing of .pro as a general TLD is a direct result of it losing its local markets.
Regards...jmcc
---------- Post added at 01:06 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:38 AM ----------
I'll ask around for stats but you can be rest assured as an absolute number, the number of parked domains in .com will far outnumber the total registrations of all other gTLDs combined.
It is one of the hardest things to measure accurately due to the bandwidth and registration volume. Verisign does some regular survey but it is limited and it only publishes multipage/single page stats from what I remember.
Even as a percentage of the total domains registered, .com will have a substantial % parked.
It does but it varies from country level market to country level market.
Who decides what is proportionate?
Me?
The Search engine developers who really analyse this kind of thing?
Can you really compare 50 million undeveloped .coms or 50k undeveloped .pros.
There's a pairing effect with .com and ccTLDs where new businesses will register both their ccTLD and the .com if it is available. This is what may have been driving .com registration figures for the last few years.
Also, people develop sites, not extensions, most don't care beyond if their brand makes sense.
For small businesses, they develop in the TLDs that are most common and most widely used in their market.
Not every extension will be successful, that's a given, but even in the most unsuccessful extensions you have breakaway sales like meet.me and soci.al - who's to say investing in them is a bad idea and why?
This is the domainer/developer dilemma. Development is essential for domaining.
Regards...jmcc
---------- Post added at 01:17 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:06 AM ----------
Absolutely. But ccTLDs were already valuable before 2007 but domainers, or more precisely American domainers have been slow to catch on. Many still believe that .de and .co.uk are the only valuable ccTLDs. I guess it's outside their comfort zone.
Many of the domainers who were financially massacred in .eu were non-EU (US and Canadian) domainers and cyberwarehousers (Dotster, Enom etc). They applied the .com rule to .eu speculation thinking that if it was valuable in .com, it would be valuable in .eu ccTLD. The problem was that it killed natural development in the English language areas. Something like 80% of UK and Irish businesses that applied for their .eu domains in Sunrise 2 did not get them due to the banjaxed, bogus, mickey mouse "regulation" of the .eu ccTLD. That killed .eu in Ireland and the UK. It had no credibility and it still has no credibility in those areas.
The EU has over 27 languages and most of these domainers were primarily hitting English language terms. They broke one of the primary rules of good domaining - know your market.
Regards...jmcc