.tv German market for .TV vs TV.com vs TV.de

[MrRhee]

A few questions for the German domain experts out there:

~ Is ???TV.com popular? Is it advertised by businesses?

~ What do you see used the most: TV.com? TV.de? .TV? What is the most preferred by end-users?

~ If registering TV.com's, where should the keyword be placed: TV???.com or ???TV.com


I'm using google and other tools for research, but I'd like some extra feedback/guidance.
any insight would be greatly appreciated posted here or via pm. thanks in advance.

.

 

[benzdorf]

My thoughts on this is as followZ, with German I go stickly dotTV, the reason is the GermanZ; I feel have addapted well to foriegn and other extentionz and de. is a two sylible sound like tv where as americanZ have this one sylible dotCOM stuck in there head. Also I have never seen any ***tv.com or ***tv.de advertised any where in Germski while on mymini adventureZ..

 

[GoneWalkabout]

MrRhee

If you are developing, I would advise you ALWAYs try and use a .de name for anything to do with Germany. They prefer that extension over ANYTHING - including .com

That said, Germans are very familiar with .TV and have little problems understanding exactly what it represents. Indeed, as has been pointed out before, two of the biggest German companies BMW and Mercedes-Benz BOTH have .tv channels.

There are some TV.com, but I would not recommend for this market.

There are the odd few tv.de names, such as stadt-tv.de, but again not recommended.

Stick to .TV if you have a televisual German idea. I have dropped many of my TV.coms but have increased my .Tv holding in this market.

Off the top of my head I own a few towns and state names in Germany such as mecklenburg-vorpommern.tv, rheinland-pfalz.tv and nordrhein-westfalen.TV (oh, Germans also LOVE the hyphens as well!!!). I also have a number of others such as Briefmarken (Stamps), heizung (heating) and rezepte (recipe).

The german market is big. However, I would advise against jumping into this arena without a good understanding of the people and language. As Hans will no doubt testify, Germans are VERY different.

 

[twomoon]

I'm not an expert, but have some experience on this market.
In my opinion German market is OK with .tv's. And I agree with Jimbojimbo that Germans have little problems understanding exactly what it represents. I think they don't associate it with ccTLD and with sinking Tuvalu lol.
I'll say more - I think that in future German market and talking globally European .tv market would be more developed than US market for .tv's.
I also think that .tv is better than tvcom for Germans. Didn't see tvde's at all.
I have only one tvcom with German keywords - apothekentv.com (means drugstorestv.com) and it even has some traffic.

 

[snoop]

Would be very careful about registering names in languages you are unfamiliar with. The German's are huge domainers (the most keen on earth) so you'l be competing against those who have a big advantage. It is a bit like people who can't speak english trying to register english domains, the results are usually terrible.

 

[equity78]

The one thing from doing some research in this area that was interesting, Germans like to use a - before the tv. n-tv.de,stream-tv.de,next-tv.de there are many examples of this. SO it seems the - emphasizes the TV. Benz maybe you can add to this as the reason why the - before tv.de.

 

[benzdorf]

All here make very valid and interesting points..

I'm not a domainer so i look at thingZ a bit from the development angle.." cool sounding nameZ "

Also google ranks German sites differently then USA google.. this may be why the "-" gets used more often..