.biz .biz VS .name - Which is the worst GTLD?

[lzy]

I'm curious, humor me will you guys? :D

 

[akcampbell]

The only thing wrong with .Pro is the $99 cost of registration and ridiculous registration restrictions. People like the word Pro, it sounds good, is internationally recognised and adds credibility to keywords.

Whoever started this site could have picked from hundreds of thousands of words to go with Name and they chose Pro and better still that person was a domainer.

If you search for the word Pro in trademark databases worldwide you will find 100's of registered marks with the word Pro in.

The best and most objective way to test for natural extension appeal is to put the extension followed by .com into a Google search. This is what you get;

net.com 19.8m
info.com 17.4m
pro.com 8m
name.com 1.5m
biz.com 1.1m
org.com 1.1m
mobi.com 0.1m

The reason .Mobi is miles ahead of .pro is because .Mobi has been marketed brilliantly and Registry.pro is the most uncommercial, inept registry ever to put a dot between two words.

Having bigged up .pro, I wouldn't advise anybody to register them. Reg fees are a rip off and the global aftermarket consists of 20 people, 19 of those are sellers, and the only buyer, me, has gone back to buying .infos.

 

[mjs]

i probably agree with .name and .pro as lowest on the tld totem pole.

There is nothing I hate worse than a trashing contest. As akcampbell notes, .Pro is far from a perfect extension. That said, in no way, shape or form should .Pro appear on the bottom of anyone's list. If it is so, you don't know Pro...

 

[CDM]

hi, yes you are right in fact because i don't own, nor have bought, sold or traded in either of those extensions so I will admit that i really don't know the markets. Perhaps I am stereotyping based on my perceptions. whatever the case it is just my perspective, as each of us is bound to have one. please forgive me for sharing it as it is obviously ill-informed. far be it from me to tell anyone how to invest. I am glad to hear your opinions as i don't like to be ignorant.

you do have many nice generics in your signature, and they fit pretty solid with .pro, but they are also category killers that would sell in .shit extension if there was one.

as to your disdain for trashing contests, you are right there as well, it is somewhat childish and now that you have pointed it out i'll say that i regret throwing in my 2 cents along with the rest, but also it feels a little like you stepped in only to defend your sacred cow from being gored, so although i feel a little sheepish i will not take it too much to heart. However I will try to be more thoughtful with my comments in the future.

kind regads,

Mike

 

[jmcc]

i guess this is what i was most curious about. i was wondering if there is a correlation between limited acceptance of the EU as a socio-political-economic institution, and acceptance as a tld.

Well some of us here consider it as a case of "EU by agreement, Irish by the grace of God". We don't really have any allegiance to the EU in the way that we consider ourselves Irish. The same probably goes for the UK and many other countries in the EU. At worst, the EU is considered a bunch of self-serving, parasitical, non-elected bureaucrats. The .eu was handled in true EU fashion - incompetently. Doubly so for the landrush. It is no use having a ccTLD if there is no country and the .eu is a classic example of this argument.

The interesting thing in one of the Eurid reports on the state of .eu was that Ireland had approximately 7K .eu domains on the Irish .eu registrars. But according to the figure on the Eurid stats site, there were approximately 27K Irish owned .eu domains registered. The real figure for Irish registered .eu domains probably lies closer to the 7K mark.

No business uses .eu as a primary brand here. It just does not appear on the radar. Most of the registrations here are brand registrations or direct to the .ie or .com website of the registrant. There are a few developed .eu domains but they are often blogs and personal sites. The .eu is sometimes used as a portal site to divert visitors to the relevant ccTLD. Marchex is using an Irish front company for its .eu domains and a number of other warehousers/aggregators have been identified. As for the entitlement/nexus enforcement - Eurid's legal department is utterly incapable of realising that Estonia does not have US Zipcodes (complete with US postal addresses). These idiots couldn't tell a fake postal address from a postal real address.

Between 01/January/2008 and 01/February/2008, the number of Irish regged .eu domains fell. Some of these were speculative registrations but some were small businesses dropping their .eu domains. Over 81% of Irish and UK companies and businesses did not get their .eu in Sunrise 2. Eurid got to pocket the $100 or so fee for each of these failed registrations and would have easily made over $10M from that little scam. Many of these business names and trademarks were picked up by organised cybersquatting and cyberwarehousing operations that Eurid aided and abetted.

It is the massive incompetence of Eurid and their political cronies in the European Commission that has destroyed .eu as a viable extension for the EU. That level of incompetence is in a class of its own and every new registry uses Eurid as an example of what not to do. Even the .Asia registry was issuing press releases pointing out how smoothly its Sunrise phase was running compared to Eurid and PwC BE's farce.

to get back on topic, i probably agree with .name and .pro as lowest on the tld totem pole.

In their own way they are niche gTLDs. The .pro was meant to be for doctors, accountants, lawyers and other professionals. It had a very narrow market and was competing against the cheaper and ubiquitous .com and the relevant ccTLDs. The .name gTLD is pointless to a large extent. People want to belong - it is a a human need. And the most obvious candidate for such a personal type registration is a ccTLD. The regulations for .ie (Ireland's ccTLD) on personal domain names was relaxed in October 2007 and it has boosted the number of .ie domains registered each day, perhaps even doubling the number of daily registrations.

One of the more accurate ways of gauging the success or otherwise of a niche gTLD would be to examine its registration statistics over its target markets rather than taking the number of registrations as a single figure. When you break the number of .eu registrations per EU country down and compare these to the registrations for com/net/org/biz/info and ccTLD in these countries, the .eu ccTLD failure is far more apparent. The figures for .asia should be interesting but I wouldn't write it off as a failure just yet. It generally takes about three years or so to see if an extension works. However a critical factor in the success of any ccTLD is a good and competent registry.

Regards...jmcc

 

[mjs]

CDM,

My apologies for allowing my response to imply personal overtones. Trashing extensions has been a sport on this blog for so long as I can recall and is unlikely to stop anytime soon. Nor are you the first, and regrettably will not be the last to challenge the viability of .Pro . My bad...

 

[Charley]

For some words i think it's a pretty good extension.

Maybe words like sex, porn, so on. Only a handful really. I don't see any other reason this extension is a HIT.

 

[skylineleong]

i vote .name

 

[CDM]

CDM,

My apologies for allowing my response to imply personal overtones. Trashing extensions has been a sport on this blog for so long as I can recall and is unlikely to stop anytime soon. Nor are you the first, and regrettably will not be the last to challenge the viability of .Pro . My bad...

no worries :D