Is the General Public Domain Name Savvy?

At a number of domain industry events late last month, I had the opportunity to ask many of the attendees, "Does your family understand what you do for a living?"  Most told me that, "No my family has no idea what I do, but they enjoy the money that I make."

Now I ask, “Does the general public understand what the domain industry does for a living?”  I think that you will agree with me that for the most part, it is still a mystery.  Just check out this YouTube video released earlier this week entitled, “How Internet Savvy Are We?”

Whether you think your friends and family would answer the questions in the videos correctly or not, I do have to say that the world is becoming more and more savvy.  In fact, I just visited Central America this week for an exposition.  I had the opportunity to meet a European businesswoman who explained to me her domain portfolio and strategy.  Although she was based in Belgium and serviced travelers to South America, she not only had .eu domains, but also .be, .com. .org, .net, and .travel domain names with her business name, variations of that name for keyword specificity, and many in various languages. 

I believe that this entrepreneurial woman is still a rarity in the general public, but I think we are starting to see the tide turning.  With the expansion of gTLDs, do you think that we will witness the growing awareness of domains amongst the general public?

What is .com?

a) .com is King

b) .com is the Golden Standard

c) .com is a brand of a generation

d) all of the above

I choose all of the above.  It is no secret that the Internet as the general public sees it is .com.  With nearly 79 million .com domain names registered and growing, how could anyone compete with such a giant elephant in the room?

However, many of the first alternatives such as .net, .biz, .org, and .info have been very successful with:

 .net= 12 million registrations

.org= 7.45 million registrations

.info= 4.79 million registrations

.biz= 2 million registrations

 Although many .com owners and domain managers of businesses may say that the majority of these are defensive registrations, I think that we are starting to see a higher, advanced level of understanding of the Internet.

Included in this mix are more specific in nature such as .edu for educational facilities, .gov for governments, and then country codes (cctlds) for numerous countries such as .co.uk, .de, .fr, .it, .es, and the like.

Why are we seeing this more segmented Internet?

I think it is simple.  As a defense mechanism, we have stereotypes of the world around us.  We size people up to understand if they are friend or foe.  This can save time by categorizing the world into classes or buckets.  And, it is NOT shocking that we are doing the same with this vast information source.

Up until now, new tlds have not been as successful as the Internet King, but as the world of Internet users is looking for more specific information quickly and most likely with mobile devices, we will see the current category specific tlds as well as others grow in popularity and number of registrations.

You may not know that all of these top-level domains exist:

.travel

.tv

.coop

.museum

.me

.tel

.mobi

Here is a list of some possible future extensions:

.health, .auto, .sports, .movie, .music, .media, and the list continues......

Let me know your thoughts on this evolution of the Internet.  Do you believe in further expansion of the Internet into these category specific tlds?