Ethics question

[jtchris]

I was searching for a few .com names but they were taken, however the .tv and .mobi names are available and the xtensions seem to be a good fit with the name. What's the general perception of reg the other extensions? cybersquatting?

 

[Jammer]

Both are fair game unless they are trademarked names.

 

[Jeff]

Thoroughly research any potential TM's here: www.uspto.gov

Secondly, ethics aside, ask yourself why both the .TV and .MOBI domains are still available for registration at this time?

Best of Luck.
-Jeff

 

[Steven]

It would depend on the situation.
Some people may have purchased keyword(s) .com to be parked.
Like what jeff said, do some research on the name for TM and etc before registering it in any extension.

 

[clocker24]

You're not cybersquatting unless it's a trademark. Realize, however, that the .tv and .mobi versions do not represent the same quality of investment as the .com, and will not have the same appeal to buyers.

 

[npcomplete]

I was searching for a few .com names but they were taken, however the .tv and .mobi names are available and the xtensions seem to be a good fit with the name. What's the general perception of reg the other extensions? cybersquatting?

I would do the TM search and then investigate the market from a ppc perspective. If it looks like a ppc page can be productive, I have found in *many* cases that I can monetize a .net page better than the competition on a .com page. The search engines do not discriminate as much with extensions as people do. That means if you are using a high quality monetization service that is *respected* by the search engines, then your .net might get better placement on a search engine results page than the .com version by a parking provider that is not as well respected by the search engine. For example, when you go to a parked page at Fabulous.com that is parking a page about dogs like ExampleDogWalkersAnonymous.net then you will probably find ads about Dog Walkers that wish to remain anonymous. That is why some search engines favor some parking providers over others - relevance of keywords to topics on page. Be sure to check google adwords to see what things are paying. In most cases a good parking service will place ads on the .nets and others and beat the competition with the .com on parked pages based on reputation of the parking service with the search engine.

So short answer is yes, I buy the .net's and on *rare* occasions (quality) would buy the .mobi and .tv and .org and .info... I do not know if this same search engine ranking "equality" extends to .TV and .mobi the way it partially does with .net and .com. My *guess* is that there may be a penalty for these extensions in search engine ranking.

You *can* still register popular search terms that pay well and sell well, but it takes a lot of work. When I hand-reg a good com/net in the language, I have noticed that the searches seem to be split about 50/50 in google result placement. I can frequently get the net on page one of google with paying keywords with my .com nowhere in sight from the same parking service. Obviously one is being penalized based on duplicate content, and the search engine selects one randomly to accept for page 1 of the results.

Edit:
The answer to the original question: No, it is not cybersquatting depending on TM. The other extensions were created to give end-users a variety of options in finding a good name for their internet site. Originally there were category restrictions on .net and .org, but these went away years ago. I actually would like to see increased parallelism in the usage of domain names in other extensions. That would be healthy for the overall domain market.

Marc