question Why is .net looked upon unfavourably?

[domains21]

Over the years I have read many people talk about how .net isn't a good choice for a chosen domain (unless it's in a hack sense) and have seen recommendations for .org over it, and I have to wonder why is this? I read something about a price increase but it doesn't look to be that much of a divide in this area.

In the early/mid-2000s I remember .net meaning something do with the WWW/Internet/Net or a network and .org was mainly used for charitable organisations. And using the main three extenstions was made easy through browser shortcuts, in fact I see these are still in use with Firefox (Win: Ctrl + Enter = .com, Shift + Enter = .net, Ctrl + Shift + Enter = .org) whereas Chrome only allows for .com. Not sure about others like Opera/Vivaldi, not tried them and I totally avoid IE.

Now, I am not being an old man shouts at cloud here as I do remember they opened up .org away from the charity sense. However, to me personally, I still see .net as the better of the two.

What say you?

 

[Haris]

It's all about convergence to a simple naming convention. Consumers demands simplicity.

I'm reminded of this little note I keep which is copied from an article written on February 12, 2015 by Andrew Allemann:

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After 20 years of being known as Sonic.net, the California ISP and telecom rebranded as merely "Sonic" after acquiring Sonic.com.

When Dane Jasper started ISP company Sonic in 1994, Sonic.com was already taken by Sonic Solutions the year before. "We were a network service provider and every ISP was pretty much on a .net, like earthlink.net, so it wasn’t a big deal to not have the .com at that time."

Over the past couple decades, Jasper realized there were drawbacks to operating as Sonic.net. There was credibility, customer confusion and email accidentally sent to sonic.com. The opportunity came after Sonic Solutions was acquired by Rovi. Sonic.net officially rebranded as simply Sonic late last year.

Jasper sees a lot of companies starting up with trendy two letter domain names. "For an infrastructure company like ours that’s providing a critical service, we can’t be a little startup on a .ly. We need to be on a .com and to control that part of our identity."
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Source: https://domainnamewire.com/2015/02/12/why-sonic-net-rebranded-as-sonic-and-how-it-got-sonic-com/

Hi Kassey, how can I contact you? at your coreile dotcom email?

Thanks!

 

[jmcc]

I read that in the early nineties .net was the preferred extension to invest in over .com. Not sure how much truth was in that info. Old schoolers I'm sure could say if that was true or not. @equity78 knows a lot about the history of domains so maybe he could chime in.

No. Definitely not. That's up there with ".CO is the TLD for companies."

Regards...jmcc

 

[jmcc]

.Net has largely lost its way as an aftermarket play. It once had a life when search ranking algos assigned weight (ranking lift) to keywords in domain name. Most of that has evaporated. .Net was also meant to be a play on "network" ~for ISPs, etc. Ironically, most hosting companies, ISPs, etc. defaulted to .Com URLs.

The TLD was really meant to be for ISPs and network operations. As the .COM took over for the general public, the .NET began to slide. It has been declining for a few years now and the recent Chinese speculation gave it a bit of a boost. The danger with a highly speculative market like the Chinese one is that a lot of the registrations tend to be one year wonders.

Alrighty. Long time since I've posted (ever?) here and long time since I've bothered to read a post here.

Good to see you around.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Kate]

After 20 years of being known as Sonic.net, the California ISP and telecom rebranded as merely "Sonic" after acquiring Sonic.com.

When Dane Jasper started ISP company Sonic in 1994, Sonic.com was already taken by Sonic Solutions the year before. "We were a network service provider and every ISP was pretty much on a .net, like earthlink.net, so it wasn’t a big deal to not have the .com at that time."

Comcast too have been using .net for a long time.

 

[DomainRecap]

To me, .ORG and .CO are the second-best domain extensions to use if the .COM is used or otherwise unavailable, along with the ccTLD if your business is, or is also, local.

Personally, I just love all this dinosaur-speak like ".NET is for Network and.ORG is for Charities" (A if for Apple J is for Jack...),. which is total BS in 2018 and hasn't been relevant in forever - seriously, no one but ultra-regimented old schoolers even care about those ancient restrictions and prophecies (Hell, I'm old school and I don't care) and lots of non-network companies run on .NET and tons of for-profit firms run on .ORG.

"It's a new world, Philip" and it has been for a long time.

Right now, the market is embracing .ORG at unheard of rates, and .CO is the young upstart challenging as the next-best option to .COM. I've always liked .ORG better than .NET, and I think the market is speaking that as both are equivalent in terms of usage, .ORG just makes more sense visually, thematically and phonetically.

Imo, most would define "Organization" as:

- A group of persons organized for a particular purpose; an association or business.
- A group of persons organized for some end or work; association.
- An organized structure or whole.

 

[winst]

The original TLD are

.com for commercial companies
.org for non-profit
.net for ISP, infrastructure, Internet related organizations

Because most companies are "commercial" most companies picked the .com names, early on the average consumers often automatically typed ".com" at the end of everything, even when they search on Google (or Yahoo, Altavista.. etc). Even today, people refer the late 90/s/2000 as "Dot Com boom/bust/bubble"

As far as domain name value goes, there is just more demand for .com.

 

[Josytal]

And the oddest part is that among the new gTLD, you have .network extension. Not sure if the extension is still alive or any sane business using it. I still prefer .net to .network

 

[CrazyTech]

Seems like .net simply suffers for being in no man's land. It never took on equal status with .com.

Look, you can disparage history all you want, but the history of .com, .net, and .org are important for understanding their popularity. .Net is sort of the forgotten step child because of the original division of categories. .Com and .org both encompass a wide range of entities.

.Com became synonymous with the web, and that's engendered in terms and phrases like "the .com crash." These weren't necessarily all .coms crashing, but they were technology-centric businesses typically built around an internet presence. Use that term for anyone above 30 and they know what you're talking about. Heck, even later millennials and younger would be vaguely familiar with it or have likely heard it in use.

.Org had a wide market because back in the day, if you were a church or nonprofit, this was your .com. So quite naturally, these two were the face of what the mainstream saw of the internet. .Net was caught in the middle. Like any new industry, there are going to be startups and supporting businesses, but look at how narrow the plot was for .net. Consolidation further narrows the field, and now it's competing with innumerable hordes of gTLDs and ccTLDs.

This is why .net hasn't really caught on outside of tech/geek circles. It never had as broad of an audience, and given how the other extensions had better penetration into the mainstream zeitgeist, it just never took off.

 

[Rich]

Not to throw it off topic here, I'm glad I stuck with 90% .com because I don't see the new tlds catching on anytime soon. I'm forever correcting people on the few random extensions I use personally. I spell out my email richard[at]ska.la to be on mailing lists to clerks, and they ask if it's. Com
I tell my gf the address of the .us site I'm building for a restaurant, she types .us.com
These are computer literate people. There are many instinances like this that leads me to believe .com will remain king for a long time.

 

[Branko Jovanovic]

My personal opinion is that .NET is best when used for any kind of online community (net-working people together) though I am not sure if Google gives any kind of SEO benefit to such websites when displaying .NET in search results.

 

[CrazyTech]

Not to throw it off topic here, I'm glad I stuck with 90% .com because I don't see the new tlds catching on anytime soon. I'm forever correcting people on the few random extensions I use personally. I spell out my email richard[at]ska.la to be on mailing lists to clerks, and they ask if it's. Com
I tell my gf the address of the .us site I'm building for a restaurant, she types .us.com
These are computer literate people. There are many instinances like this that leads me to believe .com will remain king for a long time.

I use a .me or a .us for my personal addresses. Most of the time, I'm correcting an automatic .com at the end. The .us seems to fair better based on my anecdotal experience, but .me seems to really confuse them. However, I have seen some branding with .me and I've seen it work, so I think there's definitely the confusion angle.

I believe .net to be slightly more recognizable than these, at least.

 

[DTR Alex]

At some extent, you also have to depend on search engines. I see .com secures better tanking than .net and .org.

 

[mpls]

At some extent, you also have to depend on search engines. I see .com secures better tanking than .net and .org.

Absolutely NOT TRUE.

Now I'll explain an end user POV.

I've recently started a new project on .net domain.

After 4 months of good SEO it ranks in 2nd page in google, in an ultra competitve niche. I've spent $700 / month for SEO.

I could spend $3k and buy a good .com.

But by now, the domain bought for $3k / $4k would not even be indexed in google, and it would not have earned me $ 0.0000001.

Moral of the story? No matter what extension you use (.com, .net, .org, .whatyouwant), without a good SEO sites will not rank in google (rank in google = MONEY, REAL money).

For those limited budget companies, if they have to choose between a premium .com domain or a good seo campaign, they necessarily choose the second option.

Extensions (.net in this case, and in 2018 even the domain name) does not matter for rank.

And end users want to rank.

 

[DTR Alex]

mpls, you don't have to spend Ks to buy a .com domain name, it requires just few dollars to register a .com. You can say that the .com domain name is not available, then you can add some letters, prefixes, suffixes...

The same amount of effort if you had made to rank a .com domain, your ranking would have improved more than you have now.

I nowhere see that .net outranks .com if you compare the ratio of effort.

Create two websites of same quality, one on .net and one on .com and you will see the difference....

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

In Germany .net is very valuable TLD.
Sells up to high $XX,XXX to companies like Spiegel.

 

[domains21]

I am really enjoying the discussion this has created, with plenty of excellent insight and points being made throughout.

 

[alwaysforGod]

I think .net is great, and it has been around for (in most people's mind) as long as .com and .org, which grants all three a sort of combined trust that relies on all three of them to have been established to measure a 'length of existence' anyway, if that makes sense. IMO, they will be considered the originals, along with .info and .biz, as the newer TLDs continue to take off and people become more familiar with the internet in general.