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discuss .us vs .eu - Would state tlds work?

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There has been some debate recently about the uprise of cctlds and the decline of populairity of .com. True or not we cannot argue that cctlds are in high demand these days and I think we can all agree that as for now .com is the safe choice, especially when it comes to domain investing.

Anyway, on this particular subject I'd like to look at these two extentions from an enduser perspective. I've always felt the .us extention is a weak one but so is .eu in comparison. I guess the reason for this is that both tlds connot really be concidered 'real' cctlds as both are used for an 'union' of states or countries. Therefore it lacks the power of a 'true' cctld.

This assumption may be the reason why europe has a couple of very strong and in demand cctlds which raises my question: If the usa would have cctlds for each state, would you use them? Would it appeal to you as an enduser? Being an european I'd pick cctld > com/net/org > eu but would you as an American pick com/net/org > statetld > us if a state tld existed?
 
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I bet on .us unless have very good .eu like travel.eu, France.eu, Germany.eu etc..
IMO for .us can find buyer's for domains like CannabisShop.us or Wrong.us
 
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An interesting proposition, I doubt that the economics would work if ICANN treated them like ngTLDs with annual costs. I can see them being attractive for local services and the larger states being possibly profitable. One approach would be as second order on us e.g. Name.NY.us but maybe those are reserved (they are for provincial government use with ,ca).
 
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I bet on .us unless have very good .eu like travel.eu, France.eu, Germany.eu etc..
IMO for .us can find buyer's for domains like CannabisShop.us or Wrong.us

I get that. Again, I think that is because Europeans have a strong ccTLD preference and care less for .eu. statistically speaking there should be more demand for .eu vs .us as it's over 500M people compared to 326M Americans.
 
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An interesting proposition, I doubt that the economics would work if ICANN treated them like ngTLDs with annual costs. I can see them being attractive for local services and the larger states being possibly profitable. One approach would be as second order on us e.g. Name.NY.us but maybe those are reserved (they are for provincial government use with ,ca).

Good point. If treated as ngTLD it would become rather expensive. There are large cities (nyc, berlin, etc)with their own extension though and in Holland we actually have one province with their own extension (.frl).

I don't know how economics when treated as a ccTLD would work out. I guess the same registry could manage it, having the infrastructure already in place it wouldn't add too much additional cost.

As for the second level domains, you're right .They are reserved for government etc but not much used. Actually they go further than that as also city.state.us is reserved. I read up on .us on wikipedia a while ago. Interesting read for those who have some spare time on their hands.
 
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I get that. Again, I think that is because Europeans have a strong ccTLD preference and care less for .eu. statistically speaking there should be more demand for .eu vs .us as it's over 500M people compared to 326M Americans.
As population yes
But Europe have 35-40 country's 27 are in UE
Problem is France use his on .fr , Italy use .it , Germany use .de , Austria use .at , Romania use .ro , few company's use .eu , most used .eu is in tourism industry , government , education & maybe transport or medicine
Personal i have 3 strong .eu (IMO): Senate.eu , Mayor.eu & my city Sibiu.eu

So i think is more simple for .us to find buyer's is just one big country with much more niches then .eu .In .us ccTLD i have arround 100 strong domains: Lie.us, eCasino.us,Wait.us,Exit.us,Treadmill.us & much more , they are for sale as pack
 
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There has been some debate recently about the uprise of cctlds and the decline of populairity of .com. True or not ....

lol that's definitely not true

Also there would never be a ccTLD for each state because a) states are not countries b) Many state abbreviations already exist as extensions (.co, .de, .in, .me).
 
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lol that's definitely not true

Yeah, it's debatable. It's just a small introduction to my actual question but it's worth discussing. There's an active thread going if you search NP and are interested in participating.

Also there would never be a ccTLD for each state because a) states are not countries b) Many state abbreviations already exist as extensions (.co, .de, .in, .me).

Fair point. The already existing extensions would be a problem. Maybe an alternative could be though up? I dunno. I agree it will probably never happen. As you stated states are no country. But... Neither is the EU and although officially it's a gTLD (correct me if I'm wrong) they basically got to use a ccTLD. As far as I know all 2 letter extensions are reserved for countries.

But more importantly, if you were a dentist, would you use dentist.dc if that was an option? Or better yet, as it would have more appeal to a local shop, would you use pub.ny?
 
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I think we may well see more use of city extensions in future, both on delegated ones and in new TLD applications. NYC seems to be doing OK. I think cities are a more obvious structure than states, but agree arguable.

I think its the kind of thing that could really take off if some critical mass moved to it. If people begin seeing city comains listed in ads and on vehicles they will consider one too.

Bob
 
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As population yes
But Europe have 35-40 country's 27 are in UE
Problem is France use his on .fr , Italy use .it , Germany use .de , Austria use .at , Romania use .ro , few company's use .eu , most used .eu is in tourism industry , government , education & maybe transport or medicine
Personal i have 3 strong .eu (IMO): Senate.eu , Mayor.eu & my city Sibiu.eu

Yeah I can second that. There's a lot of differences between all countries and cultures in EU. That probably contributes to the fact that your cTLD has more appeal. I mentioned pub.ny. I'd rather own pub.nl than I'd own pub.eu if I were a pub owner.

I like Senate.eu by the way. Beyond me why they didn't reserve it for governing use.

So i think is more simple for .us to find buyer's is just one big country with much more niches then .eu .In .us ccTLD i have arround 100 strong domains: Lie.us, eCasino.us,Wait.us,Exit.us,Treadmill.us & much more , they are for sale as pack

I saw your .us portfolio in another thread and there are some nice ones among them. In certain niches there are still some great domains available for registration. I myself only own a couple for personal use as officially I can't own them :(
 
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I've always felt the .us extention is a weak one but so is .eu in comparison. I guess the reason for this is that both tlds connot really be concidered 'real' cctlds as both are used for an 'union' of states or countries. Therefore it lacks the power of a 'true' cctld.
Agree they’re weak but unification isn’t to blame unless you want to lump in Austria, Brazil, Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria and other federal republics. In America it’s dot com period, anything else is fighting the tape.
 
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I think we may well see more use of city extensions in future, both on delegated ones and in new TLD applications. NYC seems to be doing OK. I think cities are a more obvious structure than states, but agree arguable.

I think its the kind of thing that could really take off if some critical mass moved to it. If people begin seeing city comains listed in ads and on vehicles they will consider one too.

Bob

Great addition! I noticed .nyc, like you said, is doing alright. I think there may be a future for city TLDs as long as they're delegated in a way ccTLDs are being delegated.

The downfall of ngTLDs (in my opinion) is that in the end of the day they're designed to make money for the registry and not to serve the users/population online presence like ccTLDs. Basically when you decide to launch a city/state tld your aim should be to provide a public service at reasonable cost to the people.

Lot's of my opinion is based on my gut feeling though. I personally only have experience with the .Amsterdam city tld but they're a disgrace and a marketing gimmick ran by the bigger players in the industry of my country.
 
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Just to be clear city TLDs are ngTLDs (I think). New city or state ones would be also.

It is true that a few ngTLDs are operated by nonprofits but the vast majority are by companies. I have not looked into the situation for the various city ngTLDs.
 
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Just to be clear city TLDs are ngTLDs (I think). New city or state ones would be also.

It is true that a few ngTLDs are operated by nonprofits but the vast majority are by companies. I have not looked into the situation for the various city ngTLDs.

Thanks for clarifying as I should have made that clear in my post. They would be ngTLDs unless something interesting would happen :)

I have not looked into city ngTLDs that much either so probably time to educate myself a bit more on this matter ;)

I'm not a ngTLD fan but it's better to vend educated opinions than merely follow a gut feeling. That's what I like about this community. Some BS but in general lots of great discussion and food for thought!
 
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. Removed as due to a lag I double posted.
 
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I am in Portugal right now in a business trip. No one uses .com
All brands are in their country tld, like .pt - as far as I have seen advertised on billboards, signs, subways.

There are some shops that even have gmail addresses for their email...
 
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I am in Portugal right now in a business trip. No one uses .com
All brands are in their country tld, like .pt - as far as I have seen advertised on billboards, signs, subways.

There are some shops that even have gmail addresses for their email...

Enjoy your trip! It's a nice country to visit. I noticed the same last time I visited Porto. I guess it doesn't differ much from how other EU countries are used to primarily use their ccTLD.

I'm not sure if there's much of a .pt aftermarket. Namebio lists some good sales though primarily through Sedo. I'd reckon there are many more private sales though.
 
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It would be nice to have an infographic with countries where .com is popular.

IMHO, i think that 90% are used in US
 
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It would be nice to have an infographic with countries where .com is popular.

IMHO, i think that 90% are used in US

Maybe @Bob Hawkes has a resource for that? He seems to be a numbers/statistics guy :)
 
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Maybe @Bob Hawkes has a resource for that? He seems to be a numbers/statistics guy :)
I don't have stats but agree it would be interesting and have made a note. While no doubt significantly higher use in US I don't know how high it really is.
Bob
 
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I checked .com registrations per country against the total of domains registered in the corrsponding ccTLD. Could be more accurate and the data used is a couple of months old but it should paint a decent picture.
 

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I checked .com registrations per country against the total of domains registered in the corrsponding ccTLD. Could be more accurate and the data used is a couple of months old but it should paint a decent picture.

That is really interesting. Thank you so much for the effort. So to be sure I am interpreting this correctly if you look at say Switzerland there are about 4x as many country code as .com registered? Interesting how low it is in countries like Poland and Sweden.
 
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That is really interesting. Thank you so much for the effort. So to be sure I am interpreting this correctly if you look at say Switzerland there are about 4x as many country code as .com registered? Interesting how low it is in countries like Poland and Sweden.

Thats correct. Could've structured it a bit better but have been doing this while cooking :). As for the cctld number of registrations, I cannot confirm if they were actually registered by someone from that country so numbers may be a bit of. Like, the total of .co registrations definitely are not held by Columbian residents :). that's an extreme ofcourse.
 
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So if we count only the countries that have 1 million + .com registration, then we have only France, Germany, Spain and UK.

Interestingly enough, when I was in Spain last year in vacation, I haven't seen any .com adverts anywhere... Maybe there are just domainers that want to flip them ? Who knows...
 
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Yeah, Spain surprised me as well. Could be a language thing... I dunno.

These numbers don't represent domains that are actually in use. From the top of my head that's about 1.7M for the .nl extension where there are roughly 4.3M registrations so it is a big factor. Most .nl domains not in use are held by Dutch domainers but it could be different for other ccTLDs.

For instance, for .de there's probably a bigger % of registrations held by foreigners as it's a way bigger market thus more profitable to invest in.
 
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