.biz .biz extension future

[Pommy - The DN Doc]

What do people think about this extension? My registrar, fabulous.com, does not reg them and I like to keep my life simple, but I have about 25 of these, all generic.

I currently rate:

.com>.net>.org>.info>.biz>country codes>the rest

Although there are clearly situations where this does not apply.

 

[Pred]

i have some lll.biz and some generics, they are worth renewing and holding for endusers
but tbh .biz really is a goner really

.biz is not above counttry codes, that is a huge error in the calculation above, in countries like Germany, UK, etc their cctld is above com, traffic and consumer awareness

some exotic tlds are rapidly scaling heights too like .tv, granted few others, most are crap

so, i would say hold your generics , just dont reg anymore 8^X

 

[james2002]

i have some lll.biz and some generics, they are worth renewing and holding for endusers
but tbh .biz really is a goner really

.biz is not above counttry codes, that is a huge error in the calculation above, in countries like Germany, UK, etc their cctld is above com, traffic and consumer awareness

some exotic tlds are rapidly scaling heights too like .tv, granted few others, most are crap

so, i would say hold your generics , just dont reg anymore 8^X

I agree with you.

BIZ looks like "bizarre" and I don't like it even though I have a few .biz domains.

Definitely .co.uk , .de are much better than .biz.

 

[Alex]

I also think .biz is no way under certain country codes.

Yes it is more used like .pn or .kg, but I do not think it is above any European cctld, or stronger one.

Regarding .biz I do not see a bright future.

 

[Pommy - The DN Doc]

I did sell deserts(.)biz for $1,000 a few months ago, which I thought was a reasonable sale...

 

[Alex]

I did sell deserts(.)biz for $1,000 a few months ago, which I thought was a reasonable sale...

It was. Congrats

 

[Pommy - The DN Doc]

Thanks.

 

[hullswingerscom]

but why is biz slipping down the charts...

 

[The Stealthy One]

.biz just hasn't taken off. I actually see it's value possibly declining in the future. It is slipping because there are more-legitimate alternatives: .com (of course), country codes, and .info.

 

[ckdomain]

.Info took off better. I used to be a big fan of .biz. I still like it, it adds color. Though I only had like 1 or 2 ever. I would get lll and keyword ones. Though sadly I think this extension will end soon

 

[lzy]

.Info took off better. I used to be a big fan of .biz. I still like it, it adds color. Though I only had like 1 or 2 ever. I would get lll and keyword ones. Though sadly I think this extension will end soon

End soon? :o

 

[newms]

What about a country name .biz. Do these have any value? Would these be ok for development? Or even a big city.biz?

 

[metronome]

well, I ask someone that has a really basic knowledge to internet (typing, surfing, email, read news, search, watch youtube, but not a domainer nor site developer nor program maker nor script maker nor blogger etc)

to him, number 1 is .com (for sure), number 2 is cc tld, number 3 is actually...... org and net, he might even think org is more popular than net lately. and when I asked about .info and .biz, he wonders if he has ever been to any of .info and .biz site lol.(he doesn't even know that .asia has already existed, haha).

and he is not european, he is asians. may be to europeans, especially UK, germany, etc, their cctld is even better than .com.

If I remember, I think I have heard from some indians too, that to them(general internet user), .com is number one, and .co.in is actually more to number two than .in. while .org is the next , and .net is after .org(not before), but oh well..... .biz future is kind of dark I think.

 

[Pommy - The DN Doc]

Well the extension is going to hell in a hand cart, judging by the current price of $1 for 6 of my dictionary .biz!

 

[Rubber Duck]

As TLDs proliferate there are likely to be a large number of casualties. Dot Biz could well be one of them. Many others are going to struggle to survive. Not only will they not get type in but Search Engine will progressively filter on extension. We have seen an era where developers have not needed to worry about extension too much. That will change. Extensions will rank differently depending on where the query comes from. If you have a minority extension from God knows where, it will get filtered out of US seach, but might do very well in Somoa.

 

[james2002]

I do think if you develop them, it should be okay. I have seen many .biz websites in the search results.

 

[michaeldotcom]

As TLDs proliferate there are likely to be a large number of casualties. Dot Biz could well be one of them. Many others are going to struggle to survive.

As the number of Internet users worldwide is increasing very quickly, as more and more businesses and people in the world want to get their own website(s), the demand for domains is rapidly increasing and will keep doing so in the future.

This increasing demand will make good .com domains a rarity, which will put their prices up and out of reach of many people and small businesses.

This will lead to an increasing demand for other extensions, including .net, .org, .tv., info and also .biz.

I've never been a great fan of .biz, but saying that many global extensions like .biz and .info will disappear, while the global demand for domains is rapidly increasing, is complete nonsense.

 

[Rubber Duck]

As the number of Internet users worldwide is increasing very quickly, as more and more businesses and people in the world want to get their own website(s), the demand for domains is rapidly increasing and will keep doing so in the future.

This increasing demand will make good .com domains a rarity, which will put their prices up and out of reach of many people and small businesses.

This will lead to an increasing demand for other extensions, including .net, .org, .tv., info and also .biz.

I've never been a great fan of .biz, but saying that many global extensions like .biz and .info will disappear, while the global demand for domains is rapidly increasing, is complete nonsense.

Analysis is completely wrong as much of the expansion will be in non-English and particularly non-Latin languages. The introduction of IDN will greatly expand the number of domains that can provide a sensible base for businesses in emerging countries. Dot Com is already a major brand in most markets so the adoption of IDN.com and IDN.cctlds is going to be entirely natural. Yes, there is a lot more growth out there but it will be largely of a completely different nature to that which we have seen so far.

Keep attending American based trade shows like Traffics and listening to the guru's of the first wave of internet expansion, and I can assure you, you will learn precisely nothing. To some extent, you have to admire the dot Mobi guys. They came up with an entirely new angle on the internet and bet the farm on it. OK, so they go it wrong, because the technology advanced faster than they could ever have imagine, but it did look like a viable new direction for a while. Hell, if I had not been so tied up with IDN at the time I might have even invested myself. But dot Biz. Give me a break. Doesn't mean much and hasn't hit the big time in English. Doesn't have anything about it to suggest it would ever have an edge in the emerging tidal wave of registrations that is about to ensue. It will be swamped with a tidal wave of new even more meaningless New gTLDs which ICANN is about to unleash. And make no mistake much of ICANNs motivation is to swamp the aftermarket with names so that most people can pick up decent names without paying a premium. That will leave dot Com, possibly dot Net and the ccTLDs both in the current and IDN forms as the only plausible vehicles of speculation.

 

[joexbl]

Analysis is completely wrong as much of the expansion will be in non-English and particularly non-Latin languages. The introduction of IDN will greatly expand the number of domains that can provide a sensible base for businesses in emerging countries. Dot Com is already a major brand in most markets so the adoption of IDN.com and IDN.cctlds is going to be entirely natural. Yes, there is a lot more growth out there but it will be largely of a completely different nature to that which we have seen so far.

Keep attending American based trade shows like Traffics and listening to the guru's of the first wave of internet expansion, and I can assure you, you will learn precisely nothing. To some extent, you have to admire the dot Mobi guys. They came up with an entirely new angle on the internet and bet the farm on it. OK, so they go it wrong, because the technology advanced faster than they could ever have imagine, but it did look like a viable new direction for a while. Hell, if I had not been so tied up with IDN at the time I might have even invested myself. But dot Biz. Give me a break. Doesn't mean much and hasn't hit the big time in English. Doesn't have anything about it to suggest it would ever have an edge in the emerging tidal wave of registrations that is about to ensue. It will be swamped with a tidal wave of new even more meaningless New gTLDs which ICANN is about to unleash. And make no mistake much of ICANNs motivation is to swamp the aftermarket with names so that most people can pick up decent names without paying a premium. That will leave dot Com, possibly dot Net and the ccTLDs both in the current and IDN forms as the only plausible vehicles of speculation.

Very well said, Rubber Duck,

although i hate to agree with you as i have some of those more 'speculative' extns, your argument is very good and makes a lot of sense.

 

[zenmushin]

For U.S.-focused sites, I rate the extensions like this:

• .com
• .net
• .org
• .biz/.us (equal)
• .mobi/.tv (equal, but depends on name)
• .fm (if audio-friendly)
• .info
• .ws
• .cc
• country codes

 

[Rubber Duck]

Well congratulations. You managed to get the first one and possibly the second one right!

For U.S.-focused sites, I rate the extensions like this:

• .com
• .net
• .org
• .biz/.us (equal)
• .mobi/.tv (equal, but depends on name)
• .fm (if audio-friendly)
• .info
• .ws
• .cc
• country codes

 

[estibot.com]

may be to europeans, especially UK, germany, etc, their cctld is even better than .com.

Certainly in many European countries, the ccTLD is hugely more valuable than the .com. I know this is definitely the case in Finland, where even 3-year-olds talk about .fi websites, and type-in traffic is almost exclusively reserved (and quite good) to the ccTLD dictionary words.

I believe the ccTLD, not .com, is the default extension in many other European countries such as Germany, Sweden, etc., but I don't know for sure, maybe some locals could comment on that.

Search Engine will progressively filter on extension. We have seen an era where developers have not needed to worry about extension too much. That will change. Extensions will rank differently depending on where the query comes from. If you have a minority extension from God knows where, it will get filtered out of US seach, but might do very well in Somoa.

That's right, and I wonder why this isn't talked about more. Google filters heavily on extension. The majority of people use Google.ccTLD, and ccTLD domains score a lot higher than .com in those searches. Developing under the local ccTLD provides a huge SEO advantage. This is one of the reasons ccTLD's are important, and will be increasingly important in the future.

This increasing demand will make good .com domains a rarity, which will put their prices up and out of reach of many people and small businesses.

This will lead to an increasing demand for other extensions, including .net, .org, .tv., info and also .biz.

I've never been a great fan of .biz, but saying that many global extensions like .biz and .info will disappear, while the global demand for domains is rapidly increasing, is complete nonsense.

I agree with your first notion, that .com will keep increasing in value. It is after all the default extension in the US and definitely has worldwide recognition. Branding a business around .com is a must. That's why smart money is still on .com.

But I disagree somewhat with the rest of your analysis - I believe that the bigger the extension jungle, the less important the non-premium extensions will become. .com and .ccTLD will rule and the rest will suffer from inflation due to the increasing number of extensions.

Keep attending American based trade shows like Traffics and listening to the guru's of the first wave of internet expansion, and I can assure you, you will learn precisely nothing.

I've observed something like that as well. Many of them became rich by smelling a market anomaly very early on, well done and all that but it seems it didn't necessarily require any business genius worth listening to. Frank Schilling is worth listening to very carefully, but he came into the game no earlier than 2002.

That will leave dot Com, possibly dot Net and the ccTLDs both in the current and IDN forms as the only plausible vehicles of speculation.

I'm personally skeptical of IDN.com for type-in traffic (the ones I have are not performing very well), for SEO yes, but for type-ins IDN.ccTLD is the way to go, definitely. They are generating nice type-in-traffic already. Are you seeing healthy type-in traffic with your IDN.com names?

 

[Rubber Duck]

I'm personally skeptical of IDN.com for type-in traffic (the ones I have are not performing very well), for SEO yes, but for type-ins IDN.ccTLD is the way to go, definitely. They are generating nice type-in-traffic already. Are you seeing healthy type-in traffic with your IDN.com names?

Seo is primarily about keyword match not extension.

With Latin IDN, the problem is that unless you put in quotation marks Google and other search engines don't differentiate. Also many Europeans actually drop the characters for SMS and probably search as well. It would therefore seem that for Latin the technology and motivation are not there to provide SEO advantage. That might change with time, but I rather doubt it.

When you get onto Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic and Hindi, it is a completely different scenario. ASCII urls give little or no SEO leverage and never will.

SEO was going great guns in Japanese, but Yahoo the main search engine changed its algos and stopped it almost dead. The reason for this is that the Mini-Site developers realised they could get huge SEO advantage by using sub-domains with Japanese characters in the sub-domain working off the back of an crappy ASCII domain. Yahoo just stopped giving ranking to Japanese characters anywhere in the domain. Yahoo's main concern appears to be not to upset the large Japanese corporations, who will also be some of their best advertising customers. However, attitudes will change as critical browser support means that effective advertising means memorable domain names. Memorable means Japanese characters by and large, although there will be exceptions. Some large Japanese brands don't really exist in Japanese characters, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule. So at some future point in time you can expect the SEO dragon that IDN really are to come back breathing fire.

For Type-In, we are really only seeing it on Russian and Arabic. We get a bit of Japanese, which pays extremely well, but it is extremely patchy. One of the reasons for this is that browser support for IDN in the Far East is still very thin. IE7 hasn't really got much traction and Firefox is non-existent, but IE6 cannot hang on forever. Pressure from financial institutions such as Paypal will mean that everyone has to drop it over the next couple of years. The browser wars are also likely to heat up in Asia.

For Far East languages, there is no type in habit. Because their browser have effectively been dysfunctional, not accepting local characters, the Modus Operandi has been to Search and Bookmark. Typing in is a habit that the Chinese and Japanese have yet to use. In both of these countries, however, dot Com is the dominant commercial extension. Dot JP has only just broke through a million registrations. Dot DE has over ten times as many. For IDN there only about 140K registrations, which has to be far less than dot Com. Neither Versign or CNNIC provide breakdowns showing IDN registrations. What we do know is that the vast majority of CNNIC registration will be ASCII as they have virtually been giving those away. The IDN registrations in the same registry have been subject to differential pricing and very very much more expensive.

Russia is a different kettle of fish. IE6 is down to about 40% there, with a three way browser battle going on between Opera, Firefox and IE7. In Russia dot com has been a minority extension with dot RU being dominant, but IDN.com are surprisingly getting very healthy traffic. There is also a further complication with Russian. It is unlikely that IDN will ever be used in Dot RU. The only people that have one at present are the Kremlin, which is up and working. IDN RU will never be used due to phishing. Cyrillics are uniquely similar to Latin characters, and there are huge concerns regarding phishing. The theory is that if you a Cyrillic extension, then that cannot happen. I guess the motivation is as much to protect themselves as the Americans. The Russian IDN extension will be .рф, which is not universally popular but pretty much a done deal.

Dot Com, however, is going to get pretty much a free run the way things are panning out. Whilst the arguments go on and during the launch period when there will be massive IDN publicity, the only thing that you will be able to register and the only thing that will resolve will be dot Com. Hence the first extension to hit the Billboard in IDN will be dot Com. That should give it the edge it needs.

 

[michaeldotcom]

Certainly in many European countries, the ccTLD is hugely more valuable than the .com. I know this is definitely the case in Finland, where even 3-year-olds talk about .fi websites, and type-in traffic is almost exclusively reserved (and quite good) to the ccTLD dictionary words.
I believe the ccTLD, not .com, is the default extension in many other European countries such as Germany, Sweden, etc., but I don't know for sure, maybe some locals could comment on that.

You're indeed right, ccTLDs are doing very well in most European countries I've been to and are very widely used both by locals and by international companies targetting this or that particular market. That's why extensions like .co.uk or .de are amongst the most successful ones in the world and definitely huge in the UK and Germany. But ccTLDs of smaller European countries (.ie, .fr., .nl, .es, .se, .it, .cz, .pl, etc.) are doing extremely well in their countries as well.
But even if .com and ccTLDs are doing very well in Europe, this does not mean that other extensions aren't doing very well here too.
Let me take the example of the UK where I live. It's obvious that .com and .co.uk are very successful here and used by lots of businesses and people. But other meaningful extensions are successful here too. For example, I can see everyday more and more businesses and people in the UK with .tv websites, advertising them heavily on billboards, on tv, etc. The future is definitely very bright for those few meaningful alternative extensions here.

I agree with your first notion, that .com will keep increasing in value. It is after all the default extension in the US and definitely has worldwide recognition. Branding a business around .com is a must. That's why smart money is still on .com.

We definitely agree that .com is THE best extension in the world, that's obvious. It will keep increasing in value, but only for meaningful domains. I mean that one- and two-word generics with development potential and geos will definitely be increasing in value with the .com extension, but that won't be the case for the many many crappy .com domains that people are still registering daily. Really good .com domains are and will always be premiums but meaningless and very long ones won't be. In these cases, I believe that a short and meaningful good domain with a good alternative extension will always be more valuable than a long and bad domain with a .com extension.
For example, spain.info is a successful website promoting tourism in Spain. This domain works very well because it's short, it's a country geo and the .info extension is becoming more and more widely used while fitting perfectly geo domains. I believe that the domain spain.info is much more valuable than a domain like spanishtouristinformation.com

I disagree with you when you say that branding a business around .com is a must. I can see and use everyday websites of very successful major companies which aren't .com domains. You need a meaningful and recognizable extension to succeed as a business online, but plenty of companies succeed online with .net, .co.uk, .de, .tv, etc domains.If your keywords are good at describing your business, your domain is reasonably short and memorable and the extension is reasonably well known and fits the domain well, you can definitely succeed online.
Many companies simply aren't able to pay huge amounts of money for short .com generics and would rather have a short and memorable .net, .tv, .co.uk, etc. rather than a long and confusing .com domain.

But I disagree somewhat with the rest of your analysis - I believe that the bigger the extension jungle, the less important the non-premium extensions will become. .com and .ccTLD will rule and the rest will suffer from inflation due to the increasing number of extensions.

I agree with you on this point to some extent only. I think that having too many extensions is NOT a good thing and that ICANN should definitely stop adding new extensions as some of them are really meaningless. For example. I don't think that .asia will ever become successful because it just doesn't mean anything to Asian people.
But there are some very meaningful extensions other than .com that are doing very well now and will keep doing well and even better in the future. The number of Internet users is growing all the time, the demand for domains too, so it's a nonsense to think that good meaningful extensions will disappear or become weaker in the future. Even if .com remains the best extension, other meaningful extensions can be even more successful if they work well with the keywords and the markets that are targeted by this or that company.

The future is definitely very bright both for .com, but also for .net, .tv, .info, .org and all the major ccTLDs.

Analysis is completely wrong as much of the expansion will be in non-English and particularly non-Latin languages.

The problem is that you always tend to see things in black and white, while the reality is always much more complex.

I agree with you that, as the number of Internet users and companies with online presence is growing in non-English-speaking countries, the demand for domains in non-English and non-Latin languages will keep growing, that's obvious.

But English-speaking countries won't disappear in the future and they will remain very strong markets, which means that the demand for domains in those countries will keep growing too. According to recent studies, only 60% to 70% of people in many English-speaking countries are using the Internet regularly. It's mostly older people who aren't using the Internet in those countries. As younger generations are far more Internet savvy, it's obvious that the number of Internet users in English-speaking countries will rise steadily from 60% to 90% or more in the future. This will mean even more demand for domains in those countries.

Moreover, more and more companies (large corporations but also smaller companies) develop more and more smaller websites as part of their marketing strategies to target specific customers, to promote specific products, to launch specific advertising campaigns, etc. This definitely won't stop in the future and this means that demand for good English domains will keep rising in the future.

It's a mistake to think that there is only a demand for English domains, but it's also a mistake to think that there will be an expansion only for non-English domains in the future. We'll actually see both.

The introduction of IDN will greatly expand the number of domains that can provide a sensible base for businesses in emerging countries. Dot Com is already a major brand in most markets so the adoption of IDN.com and IDN.cctlds is going to be entirely natural. Yes, there is a lot more growth out there but it will be largely of a completely different nature to that which we have seen so far.

I have personally nothing against IDN and I think they could do well in the future in many countries and non-Latin languages.
However I'm not sure that IDN will do that well in Latin languages. Why ? Because I think they can be very confusing.

Let me give you a few examples.
The German word for "austria" is "österreich". But before IDNs, this was often written "oesterreich" in URLs. This means that if you want to make a German .com website about Austria and buy the domain österreich.com (IDN), you will definitely lose lots of traffic to oesterreich.com (non-IDN) and osterreich.com (non-IDN). So unless you own each of these three domains, you will lose a lot of traffic to competitors. And I must say that it's extremely expensive to buy even one country geo .com domain. Will any business want to spend lots of money on a IDN .com domain like österreich.com if they know that they will lose lots of traffic to competitors who own oesterreich.com and osterreich.com ? I guess not.
Another example in French. "Students" is an excellent keyword. A domain like students.com is surely very valuable and expensive. The French for "students" is "étudiants". But will someone pay a huge amount of money for étudiants.com if they know that they will lose a lot of traffic to etudiants.com ? I'm not sure.

I've been talking about that with some average Internet users from France recently. They were actually trying to convince me that it's impossible to use French accents in URLs.

As you can see, IDN are still not known by the public, while many average Internet users know about good alternative extensions like .net, .info or .tv.

I think it's much better to own and develop both étudiants.info and etudiants.info rather than developing étudiants.com without owning etudiants.com (lots of lost traffic there).

This is why I think that IDN can be really confusing in Latin languages and why IDN sales have been fairly low in value recently.

Keep attending American based trade shows like Traffics and listening to the guru's of the first wave of internet expansion, and I can assure you, you will learn precisely nothing.

I'm personally not focused on the American market and I spend most of my time working on British and European markets.

To some extent, you have to admire the dot Mobi guys. They came up with an entirely new angle on the internet and bet the farm on it. OK, so they go it wrong, because the technology advanced faster than they could ever have imagine, but it did look like a viable new direction for a while.

No, I've never been a fan of .mobi domains and I've owned very very few of them. I don't see them as a very meaningful extension and I think that they are much better extensions out there with a much brighter future (.net, .info, .tv and major ccTLDs). These are already doing very well with good generics and geos and will keep growing in the future.

But dot Biz. Give me a break. Doesn't mean much and hasn't hit the big time in English. Doesn't have anything about it to suggest it would ever have an edge in the emerging tidal wave of registrations that is about to ensue. It will be swamped with a tidal wave of new even more meaningless New gTLDs which ICANN is about to unleash. And make no mistake much of ICANNs motivation is to swamp the aftermarket with names so that most people can pick up decent names without paying a premium.

As I said before, I've never been a fan of .biz domains. They won't ever be a major extension. However they are still quite a lot of .biz websites around (85 million results in Google). While I agree that they won't ever be huge, I don't think that the .biz extension will ever disappear, as it can still be a decent alternative for some small businesses which can't afford to buy .com domains. Same thing with Centralnic subdomains (like us.com and uk.com). I personally don't like them much but many small businesses seem happy with them, so they probably won't disappear either in the future and can even grow a bit.

This doesn't mean that I'm a fan of .biz or of subdomains, but if some people/businesses use them, why should they disappear ? For domains like anything else, even smaller markets can thrive to a certain extent.

That will leave dot Com, possibly dot Net and the ccTLDs both in the current and IDN forms as the only plausible vehicles of speculation.

Again you see the world in black and white. Even if .com and major ccTLDs are the best extensions at the moment, this does not mean that some other very meaningful extensions can't be very successful now and in the future. For example, we can see lots of major corporations investing heavily in .tv websites (for example a thread about NHL.tv has been opened recently on NP).

The convergence between television and the Internet will definitely help the .tv extension to keep growing rapidly in the years to come, as more and more big corporations and businesses will keep launching and advertising rich media .tv websites in the future in addition to their .com websites.

The .tv extension is getting well known by many Internet users. I can see lots of advertising for .tv websites on billboards and tv here in the UK. I can see that my own .tv parked domains are getting more and more type-in traffic everyday with many of them getting $xxx each in parking revenue every month.

I know you like IDN .com preaching on NP but there are definitely other areas of growth in the domaining world.