Even where it isn't ubiquitous (outside the US), unusual domains confuse plenty of non-technical users.
I own <surname>.me.uk, and it took years for relatives and others to stop querying me if I gave them my email address. "You mean, .me.uk.com?" ".me.co.uk?" "That's <name>@me.uk?".
Having said that, I've seen .travel and .jobs on big advertisements, so it's just a matter of time.
The big change since the original days of the dotcom boom is that most people no longer find websites for the first time by typing "http://www.$FOO.com" in the address bar of their browser. It is an increasingly marginal means by which valuable new traffic is driven to domains. It goes beyond just web search; a large percentage of people "find" sites by clicking on links they see in their social media or their browsers automagically remembering the actual domain for them based on a few letters of the associated brand name. The app-ification of the Internet is also devaluing domain names as a branding vehicle.
This is analogous to why no one remembers phone numbers (or email addresses) anymore. Our phones and computers abstract that away for us so that we only need to know who we want to call. This has a lot of economy in every day usage.
It's also interesting to note that Google is making a large investment in New TLDs: http://www.google.com/registry/ -- In addition to owning a lot TLDs, they just paid $25 million for the rights to .app.
> The big change since the original days of the dotcom boom is that most people no longer find websites for the first time by typing "http://www.$FOO.com" in the address bar of their browser.
You would be utterly shocked to learn that direct navigation advertising, domain rotation and other related businesses are thriving, with multi-hundred million dollar revenues.
It's not about "most" people, it's just, "financially viable people."
What I see is that direct navigation is slowly going the way of the boiled frog.
As for people on the bottom of the economic totem pole, many of them breathe their internet through a straw on some mobile "framily" plan and are often incredulous that there's this thing called WiFi you can use with a tablet. Thus they are getting forced to use modern browsers and the same thing will happen when a virus finally melts down their Windows XP machine for the last time.
I think it's more material the effect that this has on "seomaining". For a long time it was really good to have
$FOO.something
if you want to rank for $FOO. This would not give you good SEO by itself, but if you do everything else right, it's a big help. With so many domains out there, this signal will be weakened.
I believe it's still .com, then everything else, even if people typically find sites through search.
Why? If I write on a poster john.com, or on a cereal box, or on my business card, or I say 'visit us at john.com' on the radio, or my tv commercial says john.com at the end, people know exactly what to do. They recognize the words john.com as a website they can visit or search.
Now, if I say, 'visit us at john.ninja' on the radio, people have no idea what I'm even referring towards. If it's on my business card, people are wondering if my last name is ninja, or maybe this is just a fun play on words, and I refer to myself as john.ninja and the dot in-between the words is for design purposes. To fix that, you need to write more, www.john.ninja. However, it's still difficult for people to digest. Most people would probably ask, 'that's a website?', and then they would just visit google and type in 'john ninja', which may or may not get them to my site.
Try saying that on the radio, or at a meeting, or during a presentation, or when networking with someone.
It's a mess, you're having a drink and meet someone in your industry. Oh, visit my site, it's john.ninja, or http://john.ninja. They'll give you the 'huh?' look, and you need to explain that it ends in .ninja instead of .com.
You'll always need to write a longer address and can't say john.ninja. You'll always need to explain in a little more detail how to visit the website. If your site ever becomes a huge success, lots of people will be visiting john.com, so hopefully they don't run a similar business or anything inappropriate one day.
Imagine if you were Netflix, and you ran the business using the domain Netflix.video. You would be going insane right now, and be willing to spend a small fortune trying to get a hold of Netflix.com. If you bought the domain for 20 million, people would agree it was a good move and investment. That's just how important having the .com domain is to a business.
The problem with this whole argument is that the person purchasing the domain isn't the consumer.
The end user is the consumer, and the .COM TLD isn't failing them in any perceptible way whatsoever. The higher prices actually serve their needs, because they lend greater credibility to the .COMs. The consumer can trust them more, the consumer can expect greater investment in the product they serve, and the consumer can easily recognize and remember the domain name.
There is something insanely useful about New TLDs though that also lends credibility to a site. For example, I have the domain alex.social as sort of a social hub for myself. I believe that that makes my site almost more credible than my blog domain, alexkehr.com. A domain that firmly says who you are and what you do seems like it should/does have a lot of value.
yes; but if you had your blog under alex.com nobody who ever learned this about you would ever, ever forget. it would put you in a whole different league.
I dare say it would get you laid at parties. even zuckerberg doesn't have mark.com
It's funny, but our main site now uses a .solutions domain, and our existing users adapted pretty well, even those who have trouble with basic computer tasks.
That works for the mil and edu domains, because there is a verification process creating a barrier to entry, and therefore some measure of validity.
There are so many new TLDs out there that I couldn't even pick out the real ones from fake ones if you gave me a list. And most of them require no verification whatsoever, so They're completely open to legitimate users and spammers alike.
Even before gTLDs, that's why I grabbed .org and didn't worry about .com at all (owned by a Chinese squatter; unused for 14+ years now)
org doesn't even make sense as "open source", but pretty much every open source project has a .org domain; and since that's what I do, it works well for me.
I'm treating mine like a pseudo-TLD and just spamming out CNAMEs of @ for pet projects.
Of course, it used to be that an end-user could have the shortest possible domains, just like businesses of "$name.com", but now businesses can drop $25,000/yr on ".$name", which regular people obviously can't. Remains to be seen how much those get used, looks more like everyone wants to buy ".$adjective" gTLDs to resell instead so far.
I think it is hard to say how this will play out.
Maybe the author is right and people will care less about their domain name, or it could be become one of several presence items that companies use to reach customers.
For instance, the US toll-free numbers continue to increase (now 6 exchanges) despite the decline of metered toll service and payphones.
In what way is .com expensive compared to the new tlds? It isn't verisign, it's the squatters who are demanding outrageous prices... Unless the new TLDs have specific content requirements, (like .sucks has... though their pricing is the topic for a separate thread)
The squatters have already moved on to the new tlds. I recently looked up my first name, and while every tld I could find is registered, there isn't content up on any of them, it's all "this domain is for sale". I contacted one to see what price they're asking... negotiated them down to $3000. They're playing the long game.
Re: squatters...how many websites do you (reader) use when looking for X where X is even in the domain? For hosting, I use digitalocean, not hosting.com. For shopping, I use Amazon or overstock or some named store, not name-of-thing.com
When I'm searching for reviews of something and get results for "exact-thing-I-searched-reviews.com" or "best-name-of-thing.com", I immediately know those are spam and not worth visiting, since no business / forum / self-respecting personal site would call themselves something so ridiculously specific.
TL;DR generic name domains are useless since no established reputable companies use them. Look at the top Alexa 500 and consider how many related to X even have X in the domain name.
Has anyone found that the registrars for the new TLDs seem very shady? I was trying to register a domain with a new TLD and I could not find a single registrar for this particular TLD that I trusted with my credit card. Some of them had barely working websites with broken links and bad info.
There are all kinds of predictions flying around on how the introduction of new gTLDs is going to effect the economics of older TLDs. No one knows what's going to happen.
There might be some points here about the economics of namesquatting, but it's a mistake to talk about any sort of "disruptive innovation" happening here. There's nothing innovative about the new TLDs... they're just names.
The biggest problem I see with the new gTLDs is the fact that I know very little about the the companies that own them. Did they set up shop to try and sell flashy new names to suckers who don't know any better, or are they trying to build a long-term, sustainable domain business? Should I be wary of the ones that charge more, or the ones that charge less (balancing opportunistic price gouging vs making sure the business earns enough to continue to operate long-term)?
Until I have good answers to these questions, I'm avoiding gTLDs. Public acceptance of gTLDs will come eventually if it needs to, but the dearth of sleazy, extortionate gTLD companies suggests to me that ICANN has not set these up to succeed.
I can't see the Blockbuster analogy fully working here. It seems that a big reason why the old video rental model died was simply convenience. .com is the more convenient choice due to inertia.
It seems to me that a better analogy is that the new TLDs seem more like suburbs to a city. .com still lies at the city core, but the suburbs provide for a new type of Internet resident -- those who are willing to trade convenience and location for price and value.
Like Detroit, or the rust-belt in the 80's it's possible that the core becomes rotten, but it seems in those cases, the nexus still remains, but becomes depreciated. It will be interesting to see how domain real-estate follows the patterns exhibited in real-estate as the new TLDs become more ubiquitous; will there eventually be a revival of .com similar to the urban revivals we've seen? Or maybe that's just stretching the analogy a bit too far :)
Happened to us. Found a great name for our bootstrapped product. The .com-domain was already snatched from a re-seller. They wanted 28.000 USD for it. So we went with .io like so many other tech products before.
IMO .io is a little different, since it has quite a bit of momentum now and broadly speaking, stuff at .io domains is for the tech-savvy who are likely aware that there are things aside from .com out there.
If a layperson heard "visit us on the web at foo.io !" On the radio / TV, I think many would either search "foo.io" or "foo", or try foo.io.com , then get frustrated that it wasn't what they expected.
43 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 92.5 ms ] threadI still like mine though.
I own <surname>.me.uk, and it took years for relatives and others to stop querying me if I gave them my email address. "You mean, .me.uk.com?" ".me.co.uk?" "That's <name>@me.uk?".
Having said that, I've seen .travel and .jobs on big advertisements, so it's just a matter of time.
This is analogous to why no one remembers phone numbers (or email addresses) anymore. Our phones and computers abstract that away for us so that we only need to know who we want to call. This has a lot of economy in every day usage.
You would be utterly shocked to learn that direct navigation advertising, domain rotation and other related businesses are thriving, with multi-hundred million dollar revenues.
It's not about "most" people, it's just, "financially viable people."
As for people on the bottom of the economic totem pole, many of them breathe their internet through a straw on some mobile "framily" plan and are often incredulous that there's this thing called WiFi you can use with a tablet. Thus they are getting forced to use modern browsers and the same thing will happen when a virus finally melts down their Windows XP machine for the last time.
I think it's more material the effect that this has on "seomaining". For a long time it was really good to have
$FOO.something
if you want to rank for $FOO. This would not give you good SEO by itself, but if you do everything else right, it's a big help. With so many domains out there, this signal will be weakened.
Why? If I write on a poster john.com, or on a cereal box, or on my business card, or I say 'visit us at john.com' on the radio, or my tv commercial says john.com at the end, people know exactly what to do. They recognize the words john.com as a website they can visit or search.
Now, if I say, 'visit us at john.ninja' on the radio, people have no idea what I'm even referring towards. If it's on my business card, people are wondering if my last name is ninja, or maybe this is just a fun play on words, and I refer to myself as john.ninja and the dot in-between the words is for design purposes. To fix that, you need to write more, www.john.ninja. However, it's still difficult for people to digest. Most people would probably ask, 'that's a website?', and then they would just visit google and type in 'john ninja', which may or may not get them to my site.
As a side note, that's a real address :)
I think people will go back to prefixing their address with www to make them recognizable as web addresses, e.g. www.john.ninja
It's a mess, you're having a drink and meet someone in your industry. Oh, visit my site, it's john.ninja, or http://john.ninja. They'll give you the 'huh?' look, and you need to explain that it ends in .ninja instead of .com.
You'll always need to write a longer address and can't say john.ninja. You'll always need to explain in a little more detail how to visit the website. If your site ever becomes a huge success, lots of people will be visiting john.com, so hopefully they don't run a similar business or anything inappropriate one day.
Imagine if you were Netflix, and you ran the business using the domain Netflix.video. You would be going insane right now, and be willing to spend a small fortune trying to get a hold of Netflix.com. If you bought the domain for 20 million, people would agree it was a good move and investment. That's just how important having the .com domain is to a business.
The end user is the consumer, and the .COM TLD isn't failing them in any perceptible way whatsoever. The higher prices actually serve their needs, because they lend greater credibility to the .COMs. The consumer can trust them more, the consumer can expect greater investment in the product they serve, and the consumer can easily recognize and remember the domain name.
I dare say it would get you laid at parties. even zuckerberg doesn't have mark.com
There are so many new TLDs out there that I couldn't even pick out the real ones from fake ones if you gave me a list. And most of them require no verification whatsoever, so They're completely open to legitimate users and spammers alike.
org doesn't even make sense as "open source", but pretty much every open source project has a .org domain; and since that's what I do, it works well for me.
I'm treating mine like a pseudo-TLD and just spamming out CNAMEs of @ for pet projects.
Of course, it used to be that an end-user could have the shortest possible domains, just like businesses of "$name.com", but now businesses can drop $25,000/yr on ".$name", which regular people obviously can't. Remains to be seen how much those get used, looks more like everyone wants to buy ".$adjective" gTLDs to resell instead so far.
For instance, the US toll-free numbers continue to increase (now 6 exchanges) despite the decline of metered toll service and payphones.
The squatters have already moved on to the new tlds. I recently looked up my first name, and while every tld I could find is registered, there isn't content up on any of them, it's all "this domain is for sale". I contacted one to see what price they're asking... negotiated them down to $3000. They're playing the long game.
And this is the 'innovation'?
That thread was front-paged yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9357898
When I'm searching for reviews of something and get results for "exact-thing-I-searched-reviews.com" or "best-name-of-thing.com", I immediately know those are spam and not worth visiting, since no business / forum / self-respecting personal site would call themselves something so ridiculously specific.
TL;DR generic name domains are useless since no established reputable companies use them. Look at the top Alexa 500 and consider how many related to X even have X in the domain name.
The biggest problem I see with the new gTLDs is the fact that I know very little about the the companies that own them. Did they set up shop to try and sell flashy new names to suckers who don't know any better, or are they trying to build a long-term, sustainable domain business? Should I be wary of the ones that charge more, or the ones that charge less (balancing opportunistic price gouging vs making sure the business earns enough to continue to operate long-term)?
Until I have good answers to these questions, I'm avoiding gTLDs. Public acceptance of gTLDs will come eventually if it needs to, but the dearth of sleazy, extortionate gTLD companies suggests to me that ICANN has not set these up to succeed.
It seems to me that a better analogy is that the new TLDs seem more like suburbs to a city. .com still lies at the city core, but the suburbs provide for a new type of Internet resident -- those who are willing to trade convenience and location for price and value.
Like Detroit, or the rust-belt in the 80's it's possible that the core becomes rotten, but it seems in those cases, the nexus still remains, but becomes depreciated. It will be interesting to see how domain real-estate follows the patterns exhibited in real-estate as the new TLDs become more ubiquitous; will there eventually be a revival of .com similar to the urban revivals we've seen? Or maybe that's just stretching the analogy a bit too far :)
If a layperson heard "visit us on the web at foo.io !" On the radio / TV, I think many would either search "foo.io" or "foo", or try foo.io.com , then get frustrated that it wasn't what they expected.