.com vs .us question

[Pb.com]

Say a site is worth 10k as a .com

What would the .us be worth?

 

[DubDubDubDot]

I personally see the value as similar to .info. It's hard to put a % on it. .net is generally around 10% of .com. I wouldn't argue with anyone asking 1% of .com for their .info or .us.

Finding a buyer is a whole other issue though, so don't assume that just because the .com is worth $50,000 the regfee .us is worth picking up. It may or may not be.

 

[SiberForum]

I do not think that would worth the same. Maybe 20-25%. IMO

 

[howinfo]

If the site on .us extension is making the same amount of money then it should be worth the same.

 

[Sparhawke]

The .us extension is something of a joke I think, No one uses it in the US in any great numbers as I can see since they have no clue that it exists and the fact that the Americans are running it with their bullshit promises of free trade for all means that they have completely trashed what little reputation it had.

What it needs to do is throw off this great lie that everyone is equal in America and open it up to the whole world instead of leaving it purely homegrown, Americans are after all raping the whole world of their extensions aren't they?

In terms people might understand...Americans as a whole hate their own extension and no one outside the US can register it legally, when you have that you have a worthless extension.

I would avoid it like the plague or syphilis if you cannot find a damn good domain.

 

[DU]

The .us extension is something of a joke I think, No one uses it in the US in any great numbers as I can see since they have no clue that it exists and the fact that the Americans are running it with their bullshit promises of free trade for all means that they have completely trashed what little reputation it had.

What it needs to do is throw off this great lie that everyone is equal in America and open it up to the whole world instead of leaving it purely homegrown, Americans are after all raping the whole world of their extensions aren't they?

In terms people might understand...Americans as a whole hate their own extension and no one outside the US can register it legally, when you have that you have a worthless extension.

I would avoid it like the plague or syphilis if you cannot find a damn good domain.

Easy to say it's a joke when you can't actively make money from it. Not sure where this anti-american rhetoric comes from but it's a little overboard.

We're talking about domains here. It's not the scale of .com never will be... but it's not unusual to see $xxxx sales... along with the odd $xx,xxx.. with plenty of $xxx.

Talk to bmugford. I'm pretty sure he's doing just *fine* on the extension.

If the .com is worth $10K and its a nice generic. I would not be surprised to see it be low $xxx. If it's unregged or on the drop?

I just bought karat.us - Karat.com just went for $18K on Namejet with I think 200 initial bidders.

You think this is worthless? I don't understand your argument... free up .us so it's open to everyone.. and anger that people in the .us buy all the extensions?

Can't everyone just get along?

 

[hawkeye]

The .us extension is something of a joke I think, No one uses it in the US in any great numbers as I can see since they have no clue that it exists and the fact that the Americans are running it with their bullshit promises of free trade for all means that they have completely trashed what little reputation it had.

What it needs to do is throw off this great lie that everyone is equal in America and open it up to the whole world instead of leaving it purely homegrown, Americans are after all raping the whole world of their extensions aren't they?

In terms people might understand...Americans as a whole hate their own extension and no one outside the US can register it legally, when you have that you have a worthless extension.

I would avoid it like the plague or syphilis if you cannot find a damn good domain.

...ohh...kaayyy....

Always nice to see some bitter viral advice given from someone with a deep disdain for America(cans), willing to share their extensive(??) domaining experience and knowledge..!

NEXT!

 

[Sparhawke]

What I dislike about the .us extension is the hypocritical way it has been set up...in that all Americans are allowed to register extensions all over the world at will and anyone else from outside the US is not. They have basically shot themselves in the foot by disallowing outside investment.

It has nothing to do with hating Americans, there is a big difference there...

To quote something an old fart once said:

Dislike the behaviour, not the person.

The reason the extension is basically in the crapper is because it is locked off to people, the American people are largely oblivious to it and no one cares enough to give it a go, no one from the outside can get a look in en-masse and it has to contend with the farce of mismanagement from the very beginning.

The .uk and .de are great examples of what can be done if an extension is correctly managed and people are made aware of its existence, and those didn't have the oh so bloody wonderful GREATEST NATION ON EARTH!!! backing it :p

And yes, there are sales of note here and there just like every extension, but if you really delve down into it you can see that it is only cosmetic and what has been sold has just been scraped off the surface.

I have to ask in conclusion, whose bright idea was it to make sure Americans had no extension of their own, shove it in the hands of the military that completely ignored it and then release it a year after the bubble burst instead of a year beforehand to relieve some of the pressure?

 

[DU]

What I dislike about the .us extension is the hypocritical way it has been set up...in that all Americans are allowed to register extensions all over the world at will and anyone else from outside the US is not.

So you hate .ca also? I actually think the reverse is true. .ca is doing just fine and it has the same (if not stricter rules).

I think opening up .ca would be a huge disservice to the business and people of .CA.

But I don't care about the domaining industry.

.co.uk / .de popularity has nothing to do with the eligibility requirements AFAICT but is more based on end-user appreciation (end user being true end user .. not the site owner)

 

[DubDubDubDot]

The reason the extension is basically in the crapper is because it is locked off to people

.US is in the crapper because we view .com as our extension. .net and .org also have their place here. Opening up .us to the world would not change its status to Americans.

.Com, .net and .org have always been dominated by American content since the internet movement began here, which is why ccTLDs became a necessity for the rest of the world early in their own internet booms. We have had little use for a ccTLD with .com being so ingrained into our internet culture.

What they should have done in the late 90s is limit ownership of .com to the US (grandfather existing non US owners in). Then everyone would have been contained to their own extensions, with .net and .org being global.

 

[Sparhawke]

And this is the problem I tried to state in my often blunt way, the .us extension has no definition and no defining place in the world. The .com for some reason became the de-facto standard for America because of all the advertisement and now people are feeling the pinch. Prices for a very good geo.com are very high and something like NewYorkLawyer and have pushed everyone else out of the way, instead of the .com being an international standard bearer it has been shoved into a role it was never meant to have.

I still firmly believe that the original purpose of .com was always communications, not commerce since it was first envisioned by the American DoD...what has defence got to do with selling crap on the internet?

However, it is as much a myth what happened in those early days now with so many opinions and arguments that have raged, it is now almost as ambiguous as what type of fish were served by Moses.

Take a look at this plaque, it will state the early pioneers of the internet and their roles, yet no mention at all is given to Sir Tim Berners-Lee who gave us what we know and recognise today which is just as or even more important than what those earlier pioneers did. It is akin to a caveman inventing fire and instead of cooking their protein on it having someone throwing a load of water instead. The first steps are very important it is true, but what comes after is the defining moment otherwise I would not be sitting here typing in my boxers, and that would be such a great loss for the world.

It perfectly illustrates my point that so much of what is known is made up and Chinese whispered through the ages, .com was primed to be the international standard and everyone forgot that they had a wonderful extension of their own just sitting there growing moss. Add to that the fact that no one else in the world cannot take it up and create a buzz about it and you have a complete mess, Americans would much rather take extensions of other countries than their own, even that of a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific ocean, what does that say about the state of the world?

 

[Carlton]

The anti .us views expressed in this thread have no merit.

 

[Vito]

Very interesting debate/conversation here.

Sparhawke you make a lot of sense here.

We barely use .us, or even acknowledge .us because of what dubdot said...com, net and org seem to be what we know and use.

Closing out the rest of the world does seem to stunt the full potential .US growth.

I have a few .US domains but I would have more if I didnt recognize it so late in the game.

Oh, and as for Brad Mugford doing well on .US...Not a great example because it is him.
He is an anomaly to domaining.
Brad would make money on any extension even if the tld was named .$hit
lol

Great discussion here.
Vito

 

[Sparhawke]

The anti .us views expressed in this thread have no merit.

This has nothing to do with being anti or pro .us, it has everything to do with being pro .commonsense which to be truthful is about as common as a bit of beef in a big mac where that particular extension is concerned.

The last thing you want to do with any extension is sweep it under the rug and hide it, and then to make matters worse disallow anyone with outside investment from registering while at the same time promoting every other alternative under the sun.

It is the same with any business such as the restaurant trade. What would happen if you built an eatery on a back alley and then boarded off the entryway and then only told a select few how to get in who didn't have any intention to eat at your place at all? You would go bankrupt in a month. You tell people where you business is, you drag them off the street, you promote the crap out of it and accept all comers.

What the management of this extension should have done from the start is actively promote .us and told everyone it is for local business and will get the bloke from down the street knowing that burgers.us is far more relevant to him because it is actually owned by his local grill and that the burgers.com is owned by a multi-national corporation that cares far more about real estate than its fries.

What they in fact did is tout the .com to such degrees that there was a critical mass where not only those in America that assumed it was for them, but they have everyone in the world competing too.

Take insurance as an example, I believe it went for 36.6M dollars or so, people do not want to deal with corporations because they know it is all about the profit there for them, they want to deal with someone who might share their same accent.

It has great potential and always has had, what it needs is someone at the helm who can see the potential for what it is and allow it to flourish. The one thing that confuses me the most is that on Estibot (as an example simply because it is one of the better known tools) it has a place there as what would give the impression of being a major player, when it is such a minor extension in the grand scheme of things to be laughable...admittedly though it is somewhat higher than .biz which is there too :p This is not to have a go at Estibot which is a great tool, but to explain that if an extension is there then it should be a world beater...lets stop all the bullshit about my extension is better than your extension and it can beat the crap out of you and lets start getting some pride and passion again. Have a real league table of extensions and those that perform can be bigged up on ALL of the domainer tools, not an extension that no one in the real world really cares about.

.de and .uk and .in are far more deserving to be mentioned than what is currently offered...where is the biggest registrar in the world on this issue? Why do they ignore us in England and those in Germany with far more viable extensions which have been accepted from the beginning? Take a look at GoDaddy front page, .us should be emblazoned right across the top shouting out to the world that they love the extension and that it is bloody fantastic, instead there is barely a whimper in the footnotes and that is communicated to everyone else right down the line and as such it is only really the very large keywords or geo-domains that are utilised.

I am all for a country having sovereignty over its own extension and keeping it exclusive for its own citizens, but that is only practical if it can stand up on its own two feet and compete with the best the world has to offer, otherwise you might as well pull the plug on the ICU just the same as any restaurant, if you start picking and choosing who can come in when you are losing money and your place of business is on its knees then there is no hope at all.

 

[bmugford]

Say a site is worth 10k as a .com

What would the .us be worth?

Even though the majority of my sales are still the Big 3 (COM/NET/ORG), I also deal in many "secondary" extensions such as US/INFO/BIZ that are ignored by most domainers.

I would not buy a .US based on the .COM value. I would buy a .US based on potential commercial use. Generic brandables generally have far more potential value in .COM than secondary extensions.

The majority of sales in .US are to end users looking for keyword domains.

.US is certainly not used to the level of dominant ccTLD like .DE or .CO.UK, but love it or hate it, .US is the one and only ccTLD of the richest country on Earth.

I can tell you from first hand experience it is a lot easier to pitch a ccTLD than a lower tier gTLD like .BIZ proactively.

.COM dominates the US still, there is no doubt about that. However, there will always be a percent of end users who would prefer a great .US to a mediocre .COM

An example would be a term like "Child Care". The .COM would sell for $XXX,XXX+ range. Many end users just don't have that type of money. I sold ChildCare.us to an end user at a fair price to them, and a great ROI to me.

The vast majority of .US I sell actually get developed or used in some way, unlike .COM

Some examples that I have sold -

http://www.ChildCare.us

http://www.Pic.us

http://www.Bailout.us

I would probably not recommend .US strictly to flippers, but having some good keyword .US is part of a well diversified portfolio IMO.

Brad

 

[DU]

Again.

Why does .ca seem to work for Canadian businesses ?
What makes it so different?

The biggest problem with your argument Sparhawke is that it is a typical domainers argument. The .US registry is not run like a restaurant precisely because it is NOT a restaurant. The registries aren't interested in ranking next to each other so never will because it's not important to them.

Who ranks extensions?

Sedo. DNJournal. People on Namepros. No one in the real world actually cares if the site gets them what they need. The ability of a .US site to be used successfully is entirely down to the person/organization using it. The ability to sell anything is related to the salesman (within the realized limits of the product). You can't sell a .TV for a million like a .com.. and, talking of fish, you can't sell a mackeral for the price of a wild salmon.

By the way. I didn't know Moses served fish. I thought he served Israel by bringing them under the Service of God

Dollar for dollar - the US has some great opportunity both for domainers AND SMB's in the US. I think it's hard in some cases to say that there is great keyword opportunity for SMB's in .com.

If I was in England... I would go .co.uk , in Germany .de, in France .fr, in Canada .ca, and in the US .com; however, value is an issue. I might find a decent .com alternative... but I might settle for a "better" .US.

 

[Sparhawke]

Again.

Why does .ca seem to work for Canadian businesses ?
What makes it so different?

The biggest problem with your argument Sparhawke is that it is a typical domainers argument. The .US registry is not run like a restaurant precisely because it is NOT a restaurant. The registries aren't interested in ranking next to each other so never will because it's not important to them.

Who ranks extensions?

Sedo. DNJournal. People on Namepros. No one in the real world actually cares if the site gets them what they need. The ability of a .US site to be used successfully is entirely down to the person/organization using it. The ability to sell anything is related to the salesman (within the realized limits of the product). You can't sell a .TV for a million like a .com.. and, talking of fish, you can't sell a mackeral for the price of a wild salmon.

By the way. I didn't know Moses served fish. I thought he served Israel by bringing them under the Service of God

Dollar for dollar - the US has some great opportunity both for domainers AND SMB's in the US. I think it's hard in some cases to say that there is great keyword opportunity for SMB's in .com.

If I was in England... I would go .co.uk , in Germany .de, in France .fr, in Canada .ca, and in the US .com; however, value is an issue. I might find a decent .com alternative... but I might settle for a "better" .US.

I am not too familiar with the .ca but if I was to take a random shot in the dark I would say it is because businesses and the population there have fully adopted it as their own. There is no substitute to having a local population owning and believing in something which is local and I use the restaurant analogy because it fits and I know the subject too...if it is to survive then it needs not only local people but people coming from far and wide to in order to spread the word.

I do not know the population of Canada off the top of my head but America has 300M people, surely if they had had .us actively marketed to them with a clear message that it belongs to them then things would/might be different.

It is all about perception, and unfortunately no one can see it for dust compared to others :p

And I misspoke Moses' name, I meant Jesus and the feeding of the 5000 lol (or maybe I didn't and it was intentional on some subconscious level, since what we know about religious history is basically a load of exaggerated stories too with the tiniest of grains of truth there to keep it rooted in reality)

 

[liquidcherry]

Guys,

What you keep forgetting that this whole .us problem is caused by the registrar Neustar who is blatantly failing to promote their extension(unless it is up for grabs like i believe a couple months ago), but i could be wrong..just remembered that there was something ....i wish godaddy would have had a chance to grab it, that would have boosted the crap out of the extension, regardless of how godaddy is viewed by some...

Neustar is useless IMHO

btw, where is user dot us when you need him lol

Cheers

Liquid

 

[mhdoc]

However, there will always be a percent of end users who would prefer a great .US to a mediocre .COM

The vast majority of .US I sell actually get developed or used in some way, unlike .COM

Both of these are really good points. The better dot coms are held by speculators who expect to make a killing. I buy dot us because affordable quality is available. For development where the bulk of the traffic will come via search, I don't think the tld matters.

 

[mintdesignnz]

i'd go with .com than .us domain names.