news Is Google Helping End The Dominance Of .COM?

[Brands.International]

Interesting article from Forbes...

".COM still holds about 22% of all TLD registrations, according to data from Domain Name Stat"

 

[lock]

Dot com might lose some market share but it will never lose dominance.

 

[s.g]

If you're talking about the .com number, there are a lot of country codes out there. It looks like if you took all the new gtlds together, .com has 5x as many regs.

Haven't checked in awhile, looks like the overall new gtlds numbers dropped almost 10% this year, down about 3 million.
https://ntldstats.com/

This is bad. Less choices for new businesses. We were just discussing the other day that gTLDs are looked down like printed books were after the printing press was invented some 500 years back. People were like "What? You or your servants did not copy that book by hand? How can you even read it? Devil's machine made it!"

With over 100k new users joining the internet for the first time every day, new domain extensions are needed to support startups and to give new and existing entrepreneurs branding choices. There should be a group of people actively promoting them (there probably is one but not very active), regardless of who owns/sells each particular one.

 

[s.g]

Domain Name Stat may want to get a new slide rule. Verisign is in a good position to know and here's what they say: “The second quarter of 2020 closed with 370.1 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains … the .com domain name base totaled 148.7 million domain name registrations ...”
source: The Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief Q2 2020

148.7 ÷ 370.1 = 40.2%

We though so. Our guess was about 1/3.

40% is about right. Thanks for the report.

 

[Samer]

It looks like a Phil Space article and is poorly sourced. Google isn't exactly known for its expertise in running successful new gTLDs either.

Regards...jmcc

i couldve sworn they sold theirs to XYZ?
didnt google sell some?
Do we even trust google?
How long Google Domains BETA, @jmcc?
Seriously, not hyperbole to say record
Does Google even take this side biz seriously?

It’s a gamble, considering the amount revenue google makes in core competency to registrar. I still predict google gtld demise if under google

xyz guy is different case. I think he can take down donuts; dont know why i want him to; lol
“i have no horse in this race.”

 

[CraigD]

"Research commissioned by ICANN in 2016 did show that 52% of respondents were aware of at least one new gTLD name ending. But will it enough to call victory over .COM?"

Probably because they saw a link on social-media.

It's a pretty lame justification for victory over .com IMO.

They end by stating:
".COM still holds about 22% of all TLD registrations, according to data from Domain Name Stat. A leading gTLD, .xyz, has about 1.36%."

 

[premkumar]

.com is King and CCTLD's are regional kings. new Gtlds are Fantasy for quick rich dream that tumbled.

 

[jmcc]

Where can we find data on the percentage of .com developed? Thanks

Verisign had been doing periodic surveys for the Industry Brief and still surveys the .COM and .NET. I generally do periodic surveys of .COM (150K domain names) and monthly surveys of the .COM in the Irish market (approximately 140K). I'll publish the latest 150K survey in the next week.

Regards...jmcc

 

[DomainRecap]

We were just discussing the other day that (new) gTLDs are looked down like printed books were after the printing press was invented some 500 years back.

That is an absolutely horrible comparison without even a tenuous link to reality.

What is .COM then, a gold standard book manufacturing plant using the very latest technology?

 

[s.g]

New Gtld’s have been bopping up and down according to NtldStats.com.

April 2017 there are 29,447,005 registrations

February 2018 there are 22,692,244

May 2020 there are 33,707,047

Today there are 30,716,425

That is an absolutely horrible comparison without even a tenuous link to reality.

What is .COM then, a gold standard book manufacturing plant using the very latest technology?

No, now it's more like ordinary printed books vs. Kindle. Even less so because, objectively speaking, there is nothing golden or advanced about dot com. Beside its age, it's technologically exactly on the same level as Libya's .ly - we are still going the dot com way but that makes us sheep too. If you were given interested customers and a $0 bill, would you not feel bad that your newly established .recap is being looked down purely because it's new?

 

[ThatNameGuy]

Not sure about Google but some NGTs were sold to XYZ recently. Given Daniel Negari's marketing ability, it will be very interesting to see what happens with them. Many new gTLDs are nic-only zones and have not launched. Numerically, 2020 has been an insane year in the industry and there has been a massive race to quality with surges in the ccTLDs earlier in the year. The .COM also experienced some increase.

Google didn't really understand the domain name business when it got carried along on the wave of enthusiasm for the new gTLDs. The big problem was that it is very difficult to launch a TLD and there was very poor marketing of many of the new gTLDs because the registries often believed in the Field of Dreams fallacy that if you build it they will come. No marketing = low registrations. Low registrations means low awareness. Low awareness means that people don't hear of the new TLD and don't bother registering. Google's FUDbuddies in the media were useless because they were concentrated on SEO rather than domain names. Most of them had only ever heard of the legacy gTLDs like .COM/NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO and their local ccTLD. The sheer number of gTLDs launched in a short time (1,200 approx) just didn't give gTLDs any time to get established before another TLD launched. It was very poorly designed and very poorly thought out. And ICANN wants to run another round of new gTLDs.

Regards...jmcc

One thing for sure, new gTLD's don't sell themselves. In the last 30 days I've accumulated over 500 .realty domains and I'm planning an aggressive "out bound" marketing strategy to market/sell them to realtor/agents Nationwide. Fortunately I understand the real estate industry far better than the domain industry, and .realty is a better fit for "end users" than most gTLD's are for other industries.

 

[Jimmysun]

Love the article, thank you, I saw the news on Twitter too.
.comers wouldn’t like it, lol. Rejecting Ngtlds equals rejecting whole domain industry, that will only made the industry dead, means no progress.

 

[frostify]

I don't think Google is supporting the dominance of .COM.
I believe that the way the algorithm works, results that other users clicked on get pushed higher for other users to see. As most users put their trust into domains ending with .COM it creates a cycle of more clicks, pushed higher up the rankings, until all you have at the top is .COMs. I don't think Google helps them on purpose, it's based on what the visitors click on.

 

[Mytz.com]

It's also poorly written