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news Is Google Helping End The Dominance Of .COM?

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I don't think Google is supporting the dominance of .COM.
I believe that the way the algorithm works, results that other users clicked on get pushed higher for other users to see. As most users put their trust into domains ending with .COM it creates a cycle of more clicks, pushed higher up the rankings, until all you have at the top is .COMs. I don't think Google helps them on purpose, it's based on what the visitors click on.
 
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There are now 33,660,367 registered new gTLDs - last time I was checking it, it was only around 20 mil or so ... growing quite quickly, in my opinion :)
If it is purely a numbers game, then .COM wins easily. The author of the piece in Forbes is clueless about the domain name business. What distinguishes a "good" gTLD from a "bad" gTLD is usage. If a gTLD has more developed websites that are spidered by Google, then it will appear to be a much healthier gTLD than one that has millions of registrations and very little natural development and usage. In terms of registration volume, .COM wins as it has around 148.8 million active registrations and approximately 30% of those are developed. To people outside the industry, the registrations volume is all that they understand and the basis for their comparisons. A small new gTLD may actualy be outperforming .COM in terms of development and renewals but its small search engine footprint will ensure that few, if any, of the sites will appear high in Google search results.

The problem with the new gTLDs is that the larger new gTLDs skews things. Taking all the new gTLDs as a single TLD and using that 30M or so registrations as a comparison with .COM is not a good thing. It isn't even a fair comparison. Apart from the large NGTs relying on discounted registrations to inflate their zones, the new gTLDs are quite a complex set of TLDs. Some are borderline dead. At least one is in ICANN's graveyard (EBERO). Others are serving the markets that they are aimed at. None of them are going to be .COM killers and the expectation that the new gTLDs were .COM killers was wrong. It was promoted by people who really didn't understand how the domain name industry was changing and how many of the new gTLDs had effectively fallen down a gully between the legacy gTLDs and the ccTLDs. They were a great idea when Domain Tasting was stopping people getting good domain names but as soon as large-scale Domain Tasting was killed off, the demand for many of the new gTLDs was also reduced.The ccTLDs managed to capture most of that demand before the new gTLDs even hit the market.

The zone stuffing with discounted registrations has made registration volume an unreliable metric when it comes to the larger new gTLDs and some of the legacy gTLDs.

Regards...jmcc
 
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If it is purely a numbers game, then .COM wins easily. The author of the piece in Forbes is clueless about the domain name business. What distinguishes a "good" gTLD from a "bad" gTLD is usage. If a gTLD has more developed websites that are spidered by Google, then it will appear to be a much healthier gTLD than one that has millions of registrations and very little natural development and usage. In terms of registration volume, .COM wins as it has around 148.8 million active registrations and approximately 30% of those are developed. To people outside the industry, the registrations volume is all that they understand and the basis for their comparisons. A small new gTLD may actualy be outperforming .COM in terms of development and renewals but its small search engine footprint will ensure that few, if any, of the sites will appear high in Google search results.

The problem with the new gTLDs is that the larger new gTLDs skews things. Taking all the new gTLDs as a single TLD and using that 30M or so registrations as a comparison with .COM is not a good thing. It isn't even a fair comparison. Apart from the large NGTs relying on discounted registrations to inflate their zones, the new gTLDs are quite a complex set of TLDs. Some are borderline dead. At least one is in ICANN's graveyard (EBERO). Others are serving the markets that they are aimed at. None of them are going to be .COM killers and the expectation that the new gTLDs were .COM killers was wrong. It was promoted by people who really didn't understand how the domain name industry was changing and how many of the new gTLDs had effectively fallen down a gully between the legacy gTLDs and the ccTLDs. They were a great idea when Domain Tasting was stopping people getting good domain names but as soon as large-scale Domain Tasting was killed off, the demand for many of the new gTLDs was also reduced.The ccTLDs managed to capture most of that demand before the new gTLDs even hit the market.

The zone stuffing with discounted registrations has made registration volume an unreliable metric when it comes to the larger new gTLDs and some of the legacy gTLDs.

Regards...jmcc
I partially agree with some statements. But you know, I do not think the author is clueless - when discussing the complex topic as new gTLDs (basically hundreds of extensions) you can write articles that are shorter but are readable to a broad audience, while you need to sacrifice some exactness and explanation in them in order to make them short and readable, and so you must make some larger summarisations.

Or you can write articles in a more detailed style, which I usually prefer to do, maybe having more emphasis on subtle details, but then having most people complaining that they are too complex, long, and boring :)

You can never satisfy everyone. But I think it is important for us to learn what other people are reading in such publications (which are totally outside the domainer's bubble).
 
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COM wins as it has around 148.8 million active registrations and approximately 30% of those are developed.
Where can we find data on the percentage of .com developed? Thanks
 
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Dot com might lose some market share but it will never lose dominance.
 
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Where can we find data on the percentage of .com developed? Thanks
Verisign had been doing periodic surveys for the Industry Brief and still surveys the .COM and .NET. I generally do periodic surveys of .COM (150K domain names) and monthly surveys of the .COM in the Irish market (approximately 140K). I'll publish the latest 150K survey in the next week.

Regards...jmcc
 
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I partially agree with some statements. But you know, I do not think the author is clueless - when discussing the complex topic as new gTLDs (basically hundreds of extensions) you can write articles that are shorter but are readable to a broad audience, while you need to sacrifice some exactness and explanation in them in order to make them short and readable, and so you must make some larger summarisations.

Or you can write articles in a more detailed style, which I usually prefer to do, maybe having more emphasis on subtle details, but then having most people complaining that they are too complex, long, and boring :)

You can never satisfy everyone. But I think it is important for us to learn what other people are reading in such publications (which are totally outside the domainer's bubble).
Writing an article with the facts is good. The author of the article didn't have the facts and was making assumptions that were not supported by anything other than his own opinion. While he might be quite well informed on the Alphabet/Google situation, he does not understand the domain name industry or Google's place in it.

Domaining often concentrates on zonefile counts as a metric but that has not been a reliable metric since large-scale discounting. Many of the registries are now very concerned over the effects as the heavily discounted registrations do not renew. (This is why a lot of registrars are increasing the renewal fees for some gTLDs and avoiding discounting.)

Some of the new gTLDs that are heavily reliant on discounting can see over 70% of a historical zone replaced in a year. That's basically 70% of the domain names in an October 2019 zone not being in the equivalent October 2020 zone. I wrote an article about it for CircleID ( http://www.circleid.com/posts/20191...ns_future_december_2018_versus_december_2019/ ) that covered the December 2018/December 2019 comparison for the legacy gTLDs and the new gTLDs. It is one of the monthly reports that the databases crunch. It is a quick delta comparison of one zonefile with another.

That .XXX gTLD is primarily brand protection operation with minimal use. Without knowing how it is used, it might seem like an extremely robust gTLD for domaining. It is not. The problem with articles like the one in Forbes is that they are not based on data or knowledge and can be misleading.

Regards...jmcc
 
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We were just discussing the other day that (new) gTLDs are looked down like printed books were after the printing press was invented some 500 years back.

That is an absolutely horrible comparison without even a tenuous link to reality.

What is .COM then, a gold standard book manufacturing plant using the very latest technology?
 
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New Gtld’s have been bopping up and down according to NtldStats.com.

April 2017 there are 29,447,005 registrations

February 2018 there are 22,692,244

May 2020 there are 33,707,047

Today there are 30,716,425
That is an absolutely horrible comparison without even a tenuous link to reality.

What is .COM then, a gold standard book manufacturing plant using the very latest technology?
No, now it's more like ordinary printed books vs. Kindle. Even less so because, objectively speaking, there is nothing golden or advanced about dot com. Beside its age, it's technologically exactly on the same level as Libya's .ly - we are still going the dot com way but that makes us sheep too. If you were given interested customers and a $0 bill, would you not feel bad that your newly established .recap is being looked down purely because it's new?
 
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objectively speaking, there is nothing golden or advanced about dot com.

That's like saying a retail property in the Central Park area of NY is no different than a retail property in Albuquerque New Mexico, or at the low-end, the Gaza Strip. It's a building, right, and you can sell stuff there, right?

Yeah okay... keep up the good work.
 
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Not sure about Google but some NGTs were sold to XYZ recently. Given Daniel Negari's marketing ability, it will be very interesting to see what happens with them. Many new gTLDs are nic-only zones and have not launched. Numerically, 2020 has been an insane year in the industry and there has been a massive race to quality with surges in the ccTLDs earlier in the year. The .COM also experienced some increase.

Google didn't really understand the domain name business when it got carried along on the wave of enthusiasm for the new gTLDs. The big problem was that it is very difficult to launch a TLD and there was very poor marketing of many of the new gTLDs because the registries often believed in the Field of Dreams fallacy that if you build it they will come. No marketing = low registrations. Low registrations means low awareness. Low awareness means that people don't hear of the new TLD and don't bother registering. Google's FUDbuddies in the media were useless because they were concentrated on SEO rather than domain names. Most of them had only ever heard of the legacy gTLDs like .COM/NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO and their local ccTLD. The sheer number of gTLDs launched in a short time (1,200 approx) just didn't give gTLDs any time to get established before another TLD launched. It was very poorly designed and very poorly thought out. And ICANN wants to run another round of new gTLDs.

Regards...jmcc
One thing for sure, new gTLD's don't sell themselves. In the last 30 days I've accumulated over 500 .realty domains and I'm planning an aggressive "out bound" marketing strategy to market/sell them to realtor/agents Nationwide. Fortunately I understand the real estate industry far better than the domain industry, and .realty is a better fit for "end users" than most gTLD's are for other industries.
 
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It's also poorly written
 
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Love the article, thank you, I saw the news on Twitter too.
.comers wouldn’t like it, lol. Rejecting Ngtlds equals rejecting whole domain industry, that will only made the industry dead, means no progress.
 
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