Survey shows that 63% of domainers would choose the .net extension if .com was taken.
[Editors note: this is the third in a series of posts with results from the 2006 Domain Name Wire survey. The complete results of the survey will be posted soon.]
It’s an age old question. If a .com domain is taken and you choose to register another extension, what would it be? I’ve seen the question “what is the second-best domain†thrown around in a lot of forums. Despite .net registrations being second only to .com and .de, most domainers shy away from .net domains…or at least that’s what people in forums typically say. That’s why I found the following result in our survey interesting:
Q: If you wanted to register a generic domain and .com was already registered, which extension would you register assuming it was available? (assume you have to select one of these)
.net 63%
.info 18%
.org 15%
.biz 5%
That’s a landslide! 63% of domainers would register a .net name if the .com was not available, followed by .info and .org. Only 5% would register the .biz version. This is according to 582 domain name owners and service providers. That’s a definitive answer to me, and one that you won’t get from reading a bunch of forum posts.
Stay tuned for more results from the 2006 Domain Name Wire Survey.
snoops says
Most people would simply look for a different term in the .com extension rather than the original term in an alternate extension. Simply look at the difference in .com and .net reg numbers for evidence of that. I think that first step would need to be surveyed aswell for the data to be useful.