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?

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[domains21]

I think you see some of the highest-trafficked websites (Wikipedia.org, Craigslist.org, etc.) use .org making it more recognizable

Good point. Wikipedia kind of proves my point about the types of organisations, that for me, you would expect to see with it. And, do you think had craigslist used .net instead it would have made much difference? Being that the extension would have fit for its networking aspect?

more sales of .org vs .net for 2018, and it has more of a professional/business vibe to it IMO

I get that .org works well to represent a organisation, though does this put it at risk of .co taking over for smaller businesses who are not quite at that level? I quite like it being short for company myself even though that's not what it is.

 

[garptrader]

.Net is fine for a small local business which does not really engage customers via its website (restaurant or dry cleaners or hair salon). Domain investors have generally found that .Net despite its thirty year existence and some 15 million registrations and low renewal cost is very difficult to sell to end users. Sad that the newbies ignore this fact when loading up on new TLDs.

 

[cooljub]

Yeah, actually on second thought .net should be "for everything else".

The great all-rounder

 

[Weber]

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.

 

[MR Harrist]

personally I prefer with dot net than Org, in fact, I prefer biz than COm , but the truth is, market said the opposite! afterall who am I , I only seller, so I follow what market said

 

[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

 

[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.

 

[DTR Alex]

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

 

[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....

 

[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.