discuss Where .com is Not King

[ixex]

Where in the world is .com not king?

Where that other extensions are more popular, accepted, etc.?

Any other heavy rival extensions in the world regions, demographics, other than ccltds?

 

[donnied79]

In quite every country of the world, except USA, .com is NOT the king.
King is the local ccTLD.
In Italy you have most of the famous website on .it, same in Spain for .es, Germany for .de, France for .fr etc.
And in countries where it's not yet, like India with .in, it will be in the future.
.com is the King globally but locally it's not even a competition.

 

[Recons.Com]

.com is the king everywhere.

It is not about the number of regs or the number of names you see in the wild.

It is about the ambition and growth. If you are a French company with ambitions and aspirations beyond your borders, you gotta have your exact .com

You also have more flexibility: you have .com, you can operate with just that domain name globally just fine. You have your local cctld, you are limited to one country pretty much.

Add to this the fact that a) .com is de-facto cctld of the biggest economy of the world, USA; b) it is poised to receive leaked traffic from any namesake anywhere, especially from .co c) there are many large countries that use .com as part of their cctld, like .com.au, .com.tr, .com.br, .com.ar d) you immediately establish yourself as the DEFAULT company for the name, and not just in one industry like a TM could do for you. Consider "Apple". Even an apple producing company wouldn't want to name itself "Apple" nowadays, even if they legally could. And Amazon is mostly associated with the 1 trln company, not a region in SA. Could they do it if they did not own .com? Heck, no!

 

[jmcc]

.com is more king than before, and I think .net suffered most from new tlds.

The .NET was in trouble since the end of Domain Tasting in 2009. Apart from a few events like the Chinese bubble, it has been continually losing registrations. In some countries, there seems to be more interest in the .ORG now. What happens with country level markets when the ccTLD gets established is that the volume of new registrations in that country each month switches to the ccTLD and new registrations in .NET, .ORG, .BIZ and in INFO slow down with .COM benefiting from the .ccTLD/.COM effect where new businesses will register their ccTLD domain name and the same in .COM if it is available.

Markets also have a development trend when it comes to domain names. In an early market, everyone is looking to sell products and services to the world and .COM is the natural global option. As the ccTLD develops, more people in the country will use the ccTLD for their main business. At a particular point in time, people switch to using their ccTLD only because most business is local. This causes a very interesting effect in that some domain names will only ever exist in a ccTLD and not in gTLDs. As the ccTLD begins to dominate its market, businesses stop registering their .COM because the focus of their business is local. However, businesses and people will still register .COM because it is the top global TLD.

Regards...jmcc

 

[h2o]

As an American, we also get Canadian Broadcasting Network along with all the same exact advertising that Canadians see. I find it pretty surprising how much .CA gets used over .COM emphasizing Canadian presence, Canadian dollars, Canadian rules and regulations, etc. Canadians have a lower population count per square mile/kilometer so they never are added in "Top 10" lists. Maybe one day, I will count the number of .CA vs .COM I see on CBN and report my findings!

 

[abdou01]

There's also the possibility that the asking price from HugeDomains for the .com was out of reach for the buyer.

No my asking price was higher than HugeDomains's,

 

[koolishman]

Globally .com is about 40%.

Here is ccltd data.

https://www.webnic.cc/the-most-popular-cctlds-by-the-number-of-domains-registered/

 

[King]

My guess is the United Kingdom

 

[BaileyUK]

There's a number of factors to consider about what suits (putting availability to the side for the moment)

Reach is the obvious factor in choice of a Com over a cctld. Are you looking from a heavy marketing perspective or simply a presence and locator. Nature of Business and it's primary operating medium also play heavy in the choice.

The effect of Google location search has become insignificant in recent years due to their own internal metrics now weighing heavily in favor of paid for placements/ads. No matter where they come from in the world

No business wants to ignore the .com but it's significance can be marginalized in the vast majority of small to medium sized businesses anywhere outside the US

 

[abdou01]

In France too, people usually try Domain.FR first.
One day, I sold one Domain(.)fr while Domain(.)com was in sale by HugeDomains but the buyer was not interested !

 

[Amar D]

Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania

 

[pb]

It is about the ambition and growth. If you are a French company with ambitions and aspirations beyond your borders, you gotta have your exact .com

Yes, but if they want to operate locally, they need to have .fr

You also have more flexibility: you have .com, you can operate with just that domain name globally just fine. You have your local cctld, you are limited to one country pretty much.

Global brands like google, ebay etc. need local domains like .fr, .de, .pl if they want to operate on these markets. Because that's what people will type. They won't type google.com because "it's a global company". They will type google.cctld because they want their local version of that site.

Add to this the fact that a) .com is de-facto cctld of the biggest economy of the world, USA;

Yes, and only that. Every other country has its own cctld that people use (type) in the first order.

b) it is poised to receive leaked traffic from any namesake anywhere, especially from .co

I don't know much about Columbia, but in many countries not having your local domain functional or at least redirected euqals missed visitors or "leaked traffic" if you don't own it. For example in Poland many people send mails to [someone]@gmail.pl and they bounce because google didn't care to configure the domain (and at first they didn't even own it for a couple of years). I've seen it firsthand lots of times and many of these mails are lost forever, not being re-sent.

c) there are many large countries that use .com as part of their cctld, like .com.au, .com.tr, .com.br, .com.ar

Yeah, and you can be 90% sure if you tell them to visit yoursite.com, they will type yoursite.com.au etc. Muscle memory and all that.

d) you immediately establish yourself as the DEFAULT company for the name, and not just in one industry like a TM could do for you. Consider "Apple". Even an apple producing company wouldn't want to name itself "Apple" nowadays, even if they legally could. And Amazon is mostly associated with the 1 trln company, not a region in SA. Could they do it if they did not own .com? Heck, no!

There is some truth to that. If you have ambitions to be global etc. So I won't argue. But this doesn't invalidate any of the above. Also if you have a .com and a US trademark, but someone else owns for example .de and DE/EU trademark, you're screwed on that market anyway.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

This is how CENTR report state in Europe in their most recent summary report ( late fall 2019)

"Across the continent, country market share for local ccTLDs is 54% on average, based on registrants based in the country. For almost all countries, the local ccTLD is the largest by local registrations, followed generally by .com or .eu."​

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I apologize for, like many others, not picking up on the except country code reference in OP. But anyway, we have a nice discussion of country code going now .

In @jmcc recent book he makes the point that it is the large number of adoptions and use by small businesses that really drive a TLD to succeed (hopefully paraphrasing that accurately). I think in a fair chunk of the Earth, we see that if you look at the majority of active websites, like real authentic ones, the country code has a slight lead, but if we look at say the top 100 or something, then .com will dominate. I would say that is true in Canada, and from what I read seems so in much of Europe. So who is king kind of depends on definition of king. A TLD like .de can be very strong in Germany, but in global impact, since most of use in Germany and a few other countries, not so much. But in Germany, it may well be king.

As a global presence, I can't see in near future anyone coming close to .com. However, particularly if politics continues to fracture globalization, it is possible that in many parts of the world country codes will become even stronger.

I don't see .org or .net in a position to challenge .com, nor do i see .co, .io etc. They will continue to probably grow use, but nowhere near to .com.

Most of the new extensions are meant to be niche players. That does not mean that they can't be successful in those niches, just that only a few (like .xyz) are general purpose like .com is (and those few don't seem destined for dominance). I think it is possible, but unlikely, that an extension like .news might become a challenge in the news sector, and others in other niches, so collectively they might dent the .com dominance a bit, but we are nowhere near actually seeing that yet.

I see, unlike some or many probably, that the dominance of .com will slowly weaken, but it will still be #1 for a long time. Probably much longer than my horizon in domain names.

Bob

 

[jmcc]

I wonder if the reason .us did not develop as strongly as a country code is because of not just .com but also .edu and .gov. In most of the world the highly trusted government and educational sites are on the country code, and that helps with trust and respect. Like I go to government sites it is on a .ca. But in .us, there are separate TLDs for that, so the carry over of trust is absent, somewhat.

The .US is a sad case, Bob,
Some of it has to do with the registry being unable to market effectively against those TLDs in its market. But in an ideal situation, the .US would have around 50 M registrations. Some of the discounting offers in recent years were quite stupid as it is a bad way to drive interest in a TLD and a great way to kill development and credibility (loads of junk and spam registrations occur in discounting offers). Godaddy bought Neustar's registry operations and now runs .US (and .BIZ, .CO and a few others).

The .CA is doing well. There's a psychological aspect to ccTLDs in that when people think of their local ccTLD as being their TLD, it starts to overtake .COM.

The .eu is an interesting case. @jmcc has a lot on it in his recent book.

It had great prospects but it is less than half the price of a .COM registration at the moment. Unfortunately, it is caught in the non-core TLD downturn where people are rethinking what domain names in other non-ccTLD/non-COM TLDs that they can drop.

Regards...jmcc

 

[koolishman]

My guess is the United Kingdom

A Summary of the Most Popular ccTLDs
Rank ccTLD Number of Registrations
1 .CN 23.0M
2 .TK 22.5M
3 .DE 16.2M
4 .UK 13.3M
5 .TW 6.5M
6 .NL 5.9M
7 .RU 5.7M
8 .BR 4.1M
9 .EU 3.7M
10 .FR 3.4M

From the link I posted above.

 

[koolishman]

As an American, we also get Canadian Broadcasting Network along with all the same exact advertising that Canadians see. I find it pretty surprising how much .CA gets used over .COM emphasizing Canadian presence, Canadian dollars, Canadian rules and regulations, etc. Canadians have a lower population count per square mile/kilometer so they never are added in "Top 10" lists. Maybe one day, I will count the number of .CA vs .COM I see on CBN and report my findings!

If and when India catches up (1.3 billion population), .in will be in top 3.

 

[Pierre Barnard]

Definitely South Africa.. Co.za 99%

 

[forsiteowners]

I just want to tell you one thing that is very important: "com" is just a com.
Estibot shows one value. Godaddy quite different. Why is it like that?!
Google is everything today. Type-in traffic is almost history. Most important is the link popularity, backlinks, page rank(alexa rank). Domain should be short or have a word.
I've sold a lot of projects for millions in the past. I understand everything. I explained why. Why not expand, upgrade things and increase sales?

 

[pb]

Local ccTLD is more popular than .com in most countries, although .com might be high in places where the ccTLD has some crazy restrictions or prices.

However there are also countries where TLDs other than local and .com are popular, for example:
- in EU countries there is .eu, which is often preferred over .com
- in Sweden there's .nu that was made popular because "nu" means "now" in Swedish
- in Norway .as at one time gained popularity due to restrictions on .no (AS = public stock company)

 

[Bob Hawkes]

It would be interesting to have a list of country code registrations not as an absolute number but expressed in terms of the population of GDP of the country. I think if you did that .ca and numerous European country codes would do well, along with a few others. I think there is little doubt about the strength of extensions like .de and .uk/co.uk as well as others.

Certainly in Canada I think it is true that small and medium sized businesses are more apt to select .ca than .com, but any large business will almost always have both, and some will use only .com. Surveys (admittedly sponsored by CIRA!) have shown high respect and trust for .ca, and even consumer preference for certain types of service.

I wonder if the reason .us did not develop as strongly as a country code is because of not just .com but also .edu and .gov. In most of the world the highly trusted government and educational sites are on the country code, and that helps with trust and respect. Like I go to government sites it is on a .ca. But in .us, there are separate TLDs for that, so the carry over of trust is absent, somewhat.

The .eu is an interesting case. @jmcc has a lot on it in his recent book.

Bob

 

[Bertrell]

In France too, people usually try Domain.FR first.
One day, I sold one Domain(.)fr while Domain(.)com was in sale by HugeDomains but the buyer was not interested !

There's also the possibility that the asking price from HugeDomains for the .com was out of reach for the buyer.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

And I started a one man revolution for .IE .....that's because I'm Kook.ie

You either did an amazing solo job or got some help along the way @Reddstagg, as CENTR in their last report single it, and a couple others, out.

"The Irish ccTLD (.ie) has performed particularly well, having recorded high growth and an increased global Cisco rank. It has done this without compromising its renewal ratio which is above the European average, and also by keeping deletions low."​

Best wishes to all investing in .ie.
Bob

 

[Bob Hawkes]

What is a king?
I mean that somewhat seriously. When we say domain is king, do we mean by registrations, impact, respect, website use, aftermarket sales, etc.
Also, this is obvious, but .com can be king overall, without necessarily being king many places outside the us on a regional basis.
Another question I have is, do you think .com is more king, less king, or about the same as say a decade ago?
Thanks for all the interesting replies already in this thread.
Bob

 

[topdom]

.com is more king than before, and I think .net suffered most from new tlds. For example I had recovered from being a poor student 10-15 years ago and became almost a businessman, and I was not interested in paying more than 5K for a 3 letter .com (something like ANR.com), and what would be the asking price for such a domain today, start with 1M counteroffer and eventually sell for 150K. On the other hand during landrushes I was willing to pay 5K (5 times my salary) for some .info's: how stupid.