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question Why prefer ccTLD over .com

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So why does some people/companies prefer ccTLD over .com? I mean take a look at this domain fixupvillas.co.uk whose .com (plus loads of other extensions are available) and yet they chose this one.
And it's not like that at the time of registration .com was not available because it has not been registered even once.
What's the rationale behind it?
 
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Strong regional focus. But I feel they should buy .com and redirect to ccTLD.

I have seen an established business operating on .com and never taking ccTLD of their country of business for over 10 years.

Now that ccTLD is taken and a site for escorts, with nudes on landing page.
 
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Strong regional focus. But I feel they should buy .com and redirect to ccTLD.

I have seen an established business operating on .com and never taking ccTLD of their country of business for over 10 years.

Now that ccTLD is taken and a site for escorts, with nudes on landing page.

Yeah this is one reason that I thought of but still shouldn't they prefer .com or at least like you said get both and redirect .com to .co.uk

For e.g. I run a shopping site in my country and I couldn't get domain in .com so I got one in ccTLD. Exactly same name just different TLD. Granted that my site only caters to that country only but still I would have loved to get my hands on that .com
 
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Why? What makes you think that anybody, beyond domainers themselves, spend their time thinking about domain name TLDs? Don't you think running a business is absorbing enough?

I for one wouldn't dream of buying a .com for a business which only operates locally. Give me the .co.uk or the .uk every time. I think you'll find many nationalities think the same way about their own ccTLD.
 
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Why? What makes you think that anybody, beyond domainers themselves, spend their time thinking about domain name TLDs? Don't you think running a business is absorbing enough?

I for one wouldn't dream of buying a .com for a business which only operates locally. Give me the .co.uk or the .uk every time. I think you'll find many nationalities think the same way about their own ccTLD.

One reason could be that company vision changes. May be I am only regional today but tomorrow I may expand and go international.
 
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I live in the UK and the vast majority of businesses prefer it over .com unless they trade internationally......and even then a lot stick to .co.uk
 
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May be I am only regional today but tomorrow I may expand and go international.

I suggest getting established first. But even then, you are assuming that every business has a reason, an incentive or even is capable with the goods they sell, of going international. That is a very false assumption.
 
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Beat me to it @Mike Goodman

The vast majority of businesses are SME's and a lot have no intention of expanding internationally or growing beyond a set size.....

Think.....

Pubs
Restaurants
Cleaning companies
Plumbers
Electricians
1 man/woman accountants
Builders
Florists
IT consultants

etc etc - the list is pretty long.....
 
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Agreed, @NickB. Added to which even some larger businesses, or businesses with lot of outlets in their home country, may not wish or be suited to trade internationally.
 
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For the countries with strong cctld use, of course, the first choice is .cctld

But it is plain dumb not to pay $10 and buy .com too if it is available. Believe it or not, even for cctlds, a certain % of people still type in .com, or more importantly, send emails to .com.

I have set up email catchall for one of my projects. The domain is a very popular LLLL on .com

And I do receive bunch of emails for LLLL.cctlds from all over the world. Often, the employees themselves make this mistake of typing in .com. And it is also clients, partners etc. I don't read them on intention and often delete before reading, if it is clear that it is one of those cases. But it is astounding how .com is ingrained into our brains. Even for those living in Germany, UK, France, Brazil etc.
 
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@Recons.Com you can bang that drum as hard and as loud as you will. Business owners in those countries are simply not hearing you. Even if you took your drum into their offices I doubt many would listen.
 
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@Recons.Com I changed your least 3 lines to better reflect English sentiment....

But it is astounding how .co.uk is ingrained into our brains for those living in England.....
 
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In European countries, ccTLD is much more used than .com, and the question is why an Italian company should use .com instead of .it or a Spanish one instead of .es.
 
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Yes, Europe doesn't consider .com as some kind of religion.
 
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Pubs
Restaurants
Cleaning companies
Plumbers
Electricians
1 man/woman accountants
Builders
Florists
IT consultants
Yep much on that list will have a local bricks and mortar footing too; so a natural fit of extension + locale. These aren't crypto or tech startups where some or much of their growth is going to be dependent on a killer domain.

Foot traffic, ads in local news or search, WOM (word of mouth), phone book, drive by sightings.. non of this needs a dot-com.

Actually, it's a weird mind mess. In my area when I see a local business, say a mechanic or a garden center, showing a dot-com on their front window, it really looks out of place. In my mind I'm always like, "why aren't they using a .ca?"

And, the domain will most definitely suck to boot because itwillbekind-oflikethis.com. Better availability on a ccTLD versus paying up or sacrificing quality on a .com.
 
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We need to ask the anomalies;

Our beloved Germany 🇩🇪 .De Germans
Germany uses .DE domains above .Com.

2020 .De report (Believe .De total’s 16M or so)

More anomalies: New Zealand 🇳🇿 .NZ believe one of the few country ccTLD users’ outnumbers their com user counterparts.
I will now tag @jmcc who knows more about extensions health and the most recent #’s:
NZ & De used more their respective countries’ Check (.)nz stats: https://dnc.org.nz/market-data
96E71709-83DA-4837-892C-E352D45D8A94.jpeg
 
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The .NZ registry has one of the best Big Data operations in the business. The .COM and the gTLDs have been struggling in most of the countries where there is a strong ccTLD and the montly new registrations in the local ccTLDs often outpaces .COM by about 2:1 in some countries. As for .DE, it is at the number of registrations that .US should be at by now. It is a serious player. Many country markets have the ccTLD/.COM occupying over 70% or more of the country's domain name footprint.

There's a strange assumption that happens when a ccTLD becomes the dominant TLD in its country. People no longer have to remember the extension and expect that every new site targeting users in the country will use the local ccTLD because the .COM is a global brand. The same thing happened with the USA due to the .COM becoming the defacto US ccTLD. Was just finishing some stats on the .UK/ES/FR/US markets and apparently 40% of .US domain names are hosted on Godaddy's US operation. Now if Godaddy starts to market the .US ccTLD then expect the registration numbers to increase. To date, the .US has found it hard to compete with .COM in the US market.

Regards...jmcc
 
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These are the top ten hosting brands from the May 2021 .US report:
Hoster Brand - % of .US hosted - .US doms as % of hosted.

Godaddy US (Registrars) Portfolio Operator 39.63% 1.39%
Newfold Digital (Registrars) US Portfolio Operator 7.64% 0.94%
.BIZ Registry 5.95% 100.00%
NameCheap, Inc. US (Registrar) 5.38% 1.59%
Google LLC US (Registrar) 4.09% 1.21%
Cloudflare.com US (Registrar) (DDos mitigation/CDN) 2.99% 0.81%
United Internet (Registrars) Portfolio Operator 1.99% 0.54%
Above.com AU (Registrar) (PPC Parking/sales) 1.44% 4.33%
Amazon AWS nameservers 1.21% 1.02%
Tucows CA (Registrars) Portfolio Operator 1.14% 0.77%

Regards...jmcc
 
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This UK company actually redirects their .co.uk to .com and use it as main site.

thechandeliercompany.co.uk redirects to uk.thechandeliercompany.com
 
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This UK company actually redirects their .co.uk to .com and use it as main site.

Cor! Wow! You found one! Is this the one that proves your rule or is it the only one and utterly destroys your argument?

Taking a more grounded view, you could doubtless find many more if you were to look hard enough. However, the point remains that you are shouting down an echo chamber of domainers. It is really irrelevant if we all take your view, which appears to be that our beloved ccTLDs don't matter. Although reading this thread it is obvious many of us really don't agree with you.

Among the business communities of each and every country there are a minority of businesses which trade internationally or aspire to do so. Within the majority, by definition those businesses which don't trade internationally and have no wish to, the owners or board members couldn't give a twopenny fig about your claims or your opinions.

So enlighten us please, how are you going to take your message beyond this echo chamber and educate those folk beyond NP that they should buy a dotcom as well as their own, much preferred, ccTLD?
 
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Cor! Wow! You found one! Is this the one that proves your rule or is it the only one and utterly destroys your argument?

Taking a more grounded view, you could doubtless find many more if you were to look hard enough. However, the point remains that you are shouting down an echo chamber of domainers. It is really irrelevant if we all take your view, which appears to be that our beloved ccTLDs don't matter. Although reading this thread it is obvious many of us really don't agree with you.

Among the business communities of each and every country there are a minority of businesses which trade internationally or aspire to do so. Within the majority, by definition those businesses which don't trade internationally and have no wish to, the owners or board members couldn't give a twopenny fig about your claims or your opinions.

So enlighten us please, how are you going to take your message beyond this echo chamber and educate those folk beyond NP that they should buy a dotcom as well as their own, much preferred, ccTLD?

lol I don't know why you are getting hyper about it. I am just presenting my point of view and also gave one example. Good thing that the owners/BODs of this chandelier company are not like you otherwise they will never be able to grow. Again I am not saying that .com is necessary but sometime it is.
 
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not saying that .com is necessary but sometime it is

Now this is where we can probably all agree. No need to overstate the case. B-)
 
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One mistake that people make when looking at the number of domain names registered in a TLD is in expecting that they all have websites. Domainers realise that they don't. However, there is a percentage of domain names with websites that redirect to other websites in the same TLD or in gTLDs like .COM. There are four main reasons for .COM redirects in a ccTLD. The first is that the .COM is the main brand for historical reasons. The second is that the ccTLD website is the local presence for a .COM brand. The third is that the domain name is on sale (Sedo, Afternic, Sav etc.) The fourth is that the domain name is parked. Sedo and Parkingcrew have their own registrar PPC parking scheme but they use Javascript so that the domain name is still hosted on the registrar's DNS.

There is another characteristic of successful ccTLDs in that the number of unique domain names (they don't exist in other TLDs) rises as people begin to adopt the ccTLD. They, the endusers, don't see any value in registering the .COM because their business is local not global. This often makes it hard to sell the equivalent .COM to a ccTLD registrant if they don't already own it.

Regards...jmcc
 
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So why does some people/companies prefer ccTLD over .com? I mean take a look at this domain fixupvillas.co.uk whose .com (plus loads of other extensions are available) and yet they chose this one.
And it's not like that at the time of registration .com was not available because it has not been registered even once.
What's the rationale behind it?

For one thing, CCTLDs actually rank higher then TLDs when it comes to “Geo Marketing” so for anyone who is an SEO or trying to build fast traffic locally the CCTLD is the way to go ^
 
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cctld discussions are always interesting, especially in comparison to how .com is viewed in the individual countries. Most business get 1 domain name, hence going for the most obvious one - cctld, makes sense.

The businesses that think further are the one who get multiple domains, these are the ones who have some idea of Domain Names and are also looking to protect their Keyword or Brand / IP, hence register domains in other extensions particularly .com.
 
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