The rise of the dot-org
Here I show why the .org TLD will grow in standing and reputation, eating from .com’s domain market share.
TLD means Top Level Domain, such as .com and .org.
CC-TLD means Country Code TLD, such as .de and .uk.
(source)
This graphic shows the evolution of the total number of domains, per TLD, in time. From the last column, which shows the situation in august 2006, we can see that the biggest (in number of domains) TLDs are, in this order: com, de, net, uk, org, info, eu.
If we consider only the unrestricted, global TLDs (and excluding .info), we are left with this order: .com (50 million domains), .net (6 million), .org (4 million).
So .com is the main TLD, this is well known. But how to choose between .net and .org? Suppose you want to buy a domain name, and it’s not available in .com, but it is available in both .net and .org, and you want to buy it only once. What should you choose? My take is: choose .org.
Why?
While both .com and .net are operated by Verisign, .org is operated by Public Interest Registry. Verisign is generally viewed as the big bad company who makes all the money from the domain business. Between the two registries, I’d choose PIR.
But this is not all: .org simply sounds better than .net, because of the more vowel-like, round sound. It generally composes better with names ending in a consonant. Compare: menstral.net and menstral.org, I find the .org variant nicer. On the other hand, .net has the side of the omonimous Microsoft platform .NET, which perhaps has some positive impact on the number of .net domains. At least all the sites related to MS .NET would perhaps choose a .net domain over a .org one.
.net is generally viewed as the shadow of .com, the second-class .com, the .com of the poor people. That’s why many people see it as the second-choice after .com. And as .com, .net has a rather commercial connotation. On the other hand, .org has a distinct sound, originating from its association with ‘organization’. It offers the connotations of ‘community’ and ’social’. There are many businesses who deliberately chose .org over .com, the premier example being OpenOffice.org. In general, the community-oriented and the open-oriented sites would favor .org over .net. Because of these reasons, .org is gradually accumulating a better reputation than .com and .net on the web, some king of a friendlier, welcoming sound: we’re here to help, not to rip you off. But above all, the main reason for the .org rise in importance will be this self-fulfilling prophecy (just joking).
The problem with .com is the domain-spammers, or domain-bandits. They grab large amounts of domains (in the range of millions of domains), and put on them pre-made advertising pages, with no real content, with the sole intent to trick the users into clicking the ads. The situation is so bad that perhaps as much as 80% of .com domains are such obnoxious ad garbage. This is why it’s so hard to find an available useful domain in .com. This domain-pollution affects all the TLDs, not only .com, but .com is the main target because it’s perceived as being the most valuable TLD. On the other hand, as the pollution gets worse, at some point same action will have to be taken to keep the whole domain name principle working, similarly to the way email-spam, threatening the email usability, is prompting active measures.
In the mean-while, what will happen is that .com will increasingly become the domain of spammers (who are good and quick at grabbing any name that’s possible to get), while the legitimate new web sites will increasingly choose either a CC-TLD or one of .org and .net.
What about .eu? Unfortunately, .eu combines the worst features described above: it is mainly a spammers’ domain too (because of the botched launch by eurid), and at the same time it is a minor domain, much smaller than .de or .org. What’s more, it is limited to EU registrations. On the positive side, the price of .eu will decrease following the price reduction from 10e to 5e by eurid.
What about .info, .name, .biz, etc? These are minor and will perhaps never take off. The four-letter TLDs are a particularilly bad because they add one letter to the length of the domain name, without offering any advantage in exchange.
What about .mobi? IMO we should boycott this TLD, not buy it at all, because it is based on the wrong idea of a TLD, as it goes against the one-web principle. And it’s overpriced. And it’s a 4-letter TLD. I’d keep out of it for now, thanks. I hope the failure of .mobi will be a lesson for those trying to artificially impose not-needed domains. Like, why buy just one domain, when you could buy ten?
In general, I think the importance of domain names will continue to diminish, as more and more traffic is directed by search engines as opposed to users typing the URL in the browser. And I’m looking forward for a solutions to the exploding domain-spam business.
And these are all the domains I own:
francuski.com
frumos.com
javia.org
javia.eu
menstral.net
menstral.org
procod.com
proverbe.org
November 23rd, 2006 at 12:35
I agree with you regarding the haste shown by the spammers or domain pirates to take over as much .com domains as possible. However, I find your estimate of 80% .com domains taken by them to be a little high.
When choosing the name for our web application, Teamness, one of the prerequisites was to be able to obtain the .com domain with the selected name and it was a little difficult to come up with it, due to the reasons you mentioned. I think that for this reason many of the forthcoming businesses will choose .org or .net domains versus .com, taken into account that most of the future customers will get to the website by following a link returned from a search engine, found on a web page or received through an email, im or even a business card.
November 23rd, 2006 at 07:26
Hi Paul,
I based my estimation of 80% on the figures from these articles by GoDaddy’s CEO:
add-drop scheme and
domain kiting.
These posts suggest that already in April 2006, as much as 92% of new registrations were spam.
Perhaps another way of investigating the problem would be to test a sample of domain names, and see what percentage is spam. The difficulty in this case is in having a representative sample.
For example,
bobparsons.com is good, but bobparson.com is spam.