Just yesterday I had a customer relate a story where they were speaking to a tech-guru about domain names and the power of domain names. The techie said that dotcom is not relevant and is not nearly as good as the local ccTLD. This got me thinking….
In terms of numbers of domains registered according to the Dec 07 report by Verisign dotcom has just shy of 70 million registered domains versus 76 million globally for all ccTLDs (including .org, .net, .biz etc). This would suggest that dotcom is king if nothing else does!
There has been a 25% increase in the number of dotcom/net domains year on year over the last 4 years. The ccTLD market is growing faster at the moment as compared to the dotcom market as a percentage of growth due the higher numbers of dotcom domains already registered.
When I travel to the various domain conferences around the world one of the things I look out for is the use of the ccTLD in the country I’m in on bill-boards, TV and other advertising. What I notice is that more often then not ccTLD is used in the country BUT and this is a big BUT the companies advertising will nine times out of ten also have the dotcom variation of their domain.
I believe that there are a number of reasons for this:
1. It’s shorter to type in (eg. Com vs. com.au)
2. The huge amount of advertising dollars spent by multi-national corporations into the Internet has invariably promoted .com domains.
3. In the year 2000 was it a dotcom crash or a dotcom.au? The media loves sound-bites and whether the ccTLD likes it or not the Internet is often referred to as dotcom not dotcom.ccTLD. This weight of mass media is what really pushes the dominance of dotcom.
So do I ignore ccTLDs and become a fanatic for docom? No way. I believe that the future opportunities are in the ccTLD space as it hasn’t been strip mined like the dotcom domains. At the moment there are fantastic domains that can be purchased at registration cost for many ccTLDs. I also believe that you can still pick up the odd great dotcom as well J.
If you already have a portfolio of dotcom domain names then congratulations! Until we reach the saturation point in the ccTLD space that we are experiencing now in the dotcom space your domains will more than likely be more valuable than the ccTLD variation.
So it’s an interesting courtship between dotcoms and ccTLDs. I view it like a king and queen. The king is dominant but the queen has a lot of sway as well and one day the queen may find that she rules. Maybe we could get actress Cate Blanchette who played the Queen of England to act the part! It would be interesting to see what the tech-guru said then!
Wiki: Verisign
Source: Posted by Michael Gilmore – Original post on WizzBangsblog – February 2nd, 2008
