I would be really interested to know the percentage of people that can distinguish between the .co and the .com... Excepted web developers and domaininers, people can only distinguish between .com and their ccTLD...
Based on the work I do with domain stats and web usage statistics, this is correct. In most countries where there is a strong ccTLD, the domain footprint for that country will be over 80% .com/.ccTLD. The legacy TLDs like .net/.org would then represent around 10 to 15% with the rest being .biz/.info/etc. For most countries (apart from Colombia), .co would represent under 1% of their domain footprint.
Now when you look at a country in terms of the web usage of its domains, things get even worse for non-core TLDs like .co ccTLD. Businesses tend to register the .ccTLD and .com of their domain and the older or larger ones will go for the brand protection package of .ccTLD/com/net/org/biz/info. But not all of these domains will lead to a working site on those TLDs. The most common is a single site in either .ccTLD or .com. The other TLD variants are either pointed to the main site with a 301 redirect or are not even set up in the DNS. So in web terms, the set of active websites for a country is less than the total number of registered domains in that country.
But the web ecology of a country is complex. It can have active websites, PPC parked websites, holding page websites, sets of duplicate content websites, compromised/hacked websites, brand protection registrations. For a search engine developer (the people and businesses that build search engines), the set of active website can be less than 30% of a country's domain footprint.
For a few months, COInternet had been publishing a rather strange web usage "survey" of how its sites were being used. In my opinion, these surveys were complete rubbish as the methodology and classification was rubbish and amateurish. But they did look good. I took a look at the usage characteristics of a set of .co domains that were being tracked here. The results were very different. The classifiers and methodology used here are those used to build country level search engines and they sometimes run on millions of domains at a time. What emerged was a picture of a TLD where PPC parking and holding pages dominated. There was some natural development but it was below that of a normal ccTLD. There was a lot of brand protection registrations from small businesses (rather than trademark owners). While it wasn't as under developed as .mobi, there were quite a few derelict websites and clone sites. This is where people get great ideas about developing a site, stick a Joomla or Wordpress install up and then promptly forget about developing the site after a week or two because it involves real work.
The key to the success of any TLD is usage. In more general terms, it is web usage. If people see there are small businesses using the TLD and developing working websites on that TLD, they begin to use that TLD more and more and it becomes part of the set of TLDs that they instinctively recognise. While URL shorteners such as no_url_shorteners or similar are great for the registry, they don't mean anything to the average user because they are just background noise. People remember Twitter but not the shorteners. It is the Mom and Pop businesses that build confidence in a TLD. Without this critical segment of the web ecology, a TLD becomes a dead zone where domainers sell to other domainers in the hope that one day they'll recover their regfee. While .co ccTLD has not reached that point yet, a few startups using .co will not change the situation much unless one or two become the equivalent of Facebook or Google. But even then, large companies protect their brands in country level markets and will rebrand for that market with the local ccTLD. The .co ccTLD's main claim to fame is that it has one less letter than .com and is, apparently, an abbreviation of 'company'. What many people don't seem to realise yet is that in most developed country level markets, the ccTLD dominates and .com is turning into a legacy or global TLD. The bulk of real commerce will take place on .ccTLD. People will only recognise .ccTLD, .com and perhaps the ccTLDs of a few adjacent countries. In the US, the de facto ccTLD is .com and .us is not as widely used. The future for non-core TLDs like .co ccTLD is going to be dim unless people start developing websites and using it rather than parking the domains on PPC or trying to sell them.
Regards...jmcc
