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?
Posts
The only newer extension with a chance of gaining significant popularity is .tel, since it creates a specific utility for telecommunications.
ReplyDeleteThe newly proposed TLDs tend to offer very niche namespaces, and so couldn't even hope to break ~50k registrations, let alone 10+ million. Perhaps their "success" shouldn't be judged in terms of popularity though?
.mobi was a poorly conceived idea from day 1, and tries to solve a problem where better solutions exist.
Whether the crowded .com namespace will force registrations to seep into other TLDs is unlikely in my opinion - never underestimate the power and diversity of language!
.com along with the other original TLDs (.edu, .gov, .mil, .net, and .org) was established in 1985 and has grown to be the largest TLD on the Internet. We are talking about a 24 year old TLD! It is now roughly 30 thousand registrations away from breaking the 79 million registrations and still counting. In my opinion, .com will not cease to be the king. However, I believe that the Internet will need more structure to survive as a reliable source of information rather than a cluster of unverified and randomly gathered information. As to which new TLDs will survive and which will not, that is another story. People have already recognized the value of certain extensions such as .gov, .org or even .edu, which have been established for the past two decades. Certain extensions make sense to me and others are simply “wannabes” in my book. I believe that new TLDs have to make sense globally and also should cover major industries.
ReplyDeleteHere are some of the new TLDs I believe have a lot of potential:
.tel
.tv
.travel
And all ccTLDs such as .fr, .de, .us….etc
.com has evolved into a strongly branded and globally recognized extension. However, I believe the Internet is ready for a more organized informational source, and will slowly but surely give in to the new TLDs that make sense!