In today’s world, secondary domains leak traffic to .com and dominant country code domains. Will this change?
One of the challenges of registering a domain under a top level domain that’s not dominant in the location of most of your website visitors is confusion.
In the U.S., that means choosing a domain other than .com.
In the Czech Republic, that means choosing a domain other than .cz.
Whatever the dominant TLD is in a country, opting for another extensions leads to confusion.
That’s been the case for over a decade, and it’s still the case today in 2014.
Let me give you an example from about a decade ago:
A U.S. state owned a .org domain name that they promoted to their residents. I owned the matching .com. As a result, I consistently received traffic to my .com that’s intended for the state’s .org.
Many residents of that state even sent email to me through the .com.
About a decade ago, when the state was heavily promoting its website, it decided to robocall its residents to promote the site. It told them to go to the .org, but guess what? Many of them came to .com.
I found out about these robocalls because one night I got a couple angry emails and a phone call. The people accused me of robocalling them. The guy who called me thought I had been sending the robocalls and pretending to be the state agency.
Keep in mind this person who called was sophisticated enough to look up my phone number in whois. But he still got confused when he heard .org and typed in .com instead.
Fast forward to today. What happened with Healthcare.gov got lots of press over the past few months?
Lots of people went to Healthcare.com. Lots. The owners of Healthcare.com will be able to retire off of visitors looking for Healthcare.gov.
As of today, in countries where there’s a dominant TLD, there’s leakage to the dominant TLD.
This is relevant in the wake of hundreds of new TLDs. People get confused. It’s part of the reason I see some .com domain names getting a lot more traffic in the next few years.
Anyone who owns a decent portfolio of .com domains has experienced this same confusion, and I doubt they’d argue otherwise.
The question looking forward is if that confusion will dissipate.
When I visited Australia about a year and half ago, I couldn’t really tell which TLD was dominant. There were lots of ads for .com.au. There were lots for .com. Maybe one is statistically dominant, but from my two weeks there I didn’t notice one. So if I lived in Australia, I’d probably pay closer attention to the TLD.
Will people start paying closer attention to the TLD in the future? How long will it be until they do? 1 year? 5? 10?
If you choose to start a site on a non-dominant TLD, you have to be prepared for some traffic leakage.
Which leads to another question: how big of a deal is it if your domain leaks to another?
This depends a lot on the type of visitors you attract, how they discover your site, and how the matching dominant TLD is used.
There are some sites that attract sophisticated internet users, primarily via search or RSS. It’s probably not a big deal if they accidentally go to another domain. They’ll end up finding the right site.
It’s a bigger deal for commerce sites, sites that get lots of traffic by word-of-mouth or people typing in the domain, and those with a less sophisticated user base. It’s an even bigger deal if the domain they leak traffic to is similar or takes advantage of the users in some way.
Whether leakage will continue and for how long is open to debate. But today it exists, and businesses need to take this into consideration.
Acro says
Businesses that will wait in the sidelines to “ponder” how the new extensions would perform, are up for a rude awakening. If the matching gTLD for one’s industry is out, e.g. photography, technology etc. the time to secure the brand, along with strategic alternates is NOW.
The traffic leakage occurs when the brand is weak and unknown. If one’s campaign can’t point out CLEAR enough what the domain is, they need to hire a competent agency, or at least use a different, more knowledgeable relative that ‘dabbles’ in domains.
Incidentally, in a world that advances even further with the URL destination becoming less of a type action and more of a scan/dictate/gesture/link one, the point of erroneous redirects becomes even more moot.
Johnnie says
Didn’t quite work out for Budweiser or Overstock, but somehow it’ll work out for smaller brands.
Acro says
That argument is old and tiring. Find a new one, or you might wake up one day with brand reality hitting down hard.
Andrew Allemann says
It’s actually a very relevant argument, even if it’s old. They are actual cases of confusion.
Joseph Peterson says
@Acro,
“That argument is old and tiring.”
Some of the more strident propaganda for the new extensions is “new an tiring”, which I don’t see as an improvement.
Frankly, I don’t think arguments should be evaluated on the basis of their being
old / new
or
exciting / tiring.
Traditionally, arguments are judged based on whether they’re verifiable true / false or incoherent.
Johnnie says
It’s an argument that makes sense and one you couldn’t even make a decent reply with. Frank made the argument with Bud on his blog. The Overstock one had been talked about all over the place. These new, novelty extensions are geared to new business. They’re not going to have the type of budgets the ones mentioned have. How many new businesses have, can afford advertising agencies? That was a ridiculous comment. And if they have any money and were smart, they would go with .com. What you’re missing is some basic marketing 101 type stuff, consumer behavior.
YouDeeArePee says
It will not change. .COM is still being sought after as the Internet continues to become more utilized and since all other countries are interested in following .COM standard… you cannot change this.
Thuggy Biggers says
@ Acro — “The traffic leakage occurs when the brand is weak and unknown”. – That’s not even remotely true. That’s totally false.
I own a domain that is the name of a very established restaurant that put Restaurant on the end of their name instead of buying the domain from me.. They advertise the sh*t out of it for over a decade but most visitors go to my domain, about 900 uniques a day.
I have made about 400K on it over the years.
I have countless examples like this. Domains like these have made several million dollars for me.
Acro says
How are these two comparable? Keyword .com vs. Keyword+keyword2 isn’t the same when compared to keyword.gTLD. A lot of what has worked in the past 20+ years will change – not overnight, but it will.
Brian Chiyama says
It’s true about leakage. Two competing companies own Womany.net and Womany.cc. I own Womany.com. I get some traffic and my site has been first on Bing, Yahoo, etc but not Google. I have had offers from the two firms which I believe were not good enough. How best can I benefit from this leakage? I don’t regret because I registered my name years before these came into existence and has used it in the same categories. There is no bad faith in my registration. At this point I wouldn’t want a bad relationship with the two either because they may end up making a better offer.
Thuggy Biggers says
I also have one of the Obamacare related domains and it makes a lot of money every day because they went with a .org.
Domenclature.com says
Excellent and timely article.
In the real world, companies are now referred with only their first names, no extension, because the extension is a constant, not a variable; for example, you seldom hear or see any say: I’m on facebook.com or twitter.com, or ask you to google.com it. Rather they will say I’m on Facebook or Twitter or Google it. They assume you know the extension. They know you’re not going to try google.photographer.
And that’s huge.
Joseph Peterson says
What you describe is a common phenomenon. During the last presidential election, I got phone calls from people asking me where to vote (owing to domains in my portfolio).
Regardless of the extension, ambiguity leads to misdirected traffic, misheard names, and misremembered addresses.
Domainers typically estimate the traffic leakage in terms of unique visitors to corresponding domains, which are usually parked.
But that’s a SEVERE underestimate.
Ambiguity and error mostly leads people Google (or some other search engine) … and away from direct navigation.
They’re very likely to click on the ad or organic search result of something totally unrelated to the domain name they can’t get straight.
For every misdirected type-in there are probably dozens or hundreds of leaks to search. There prospective customers must run the gauntlet of Google advertisers.
So in a perverse way, bad brand names and ambiguous domains actually advertise not only the company but the company’s competitors.
What I’m saying here is not about the .COM / nTLD debate. It’s about ambiguity pure and simple. And that has existed in many forms as long as the internet has been around. Nowadays it’s just a bigger issue.
Rio 2 says
You nailed it, Andrew! Forget the length of the new gtlds, or the fact that they have been tried and failed before, or the fact that they are 3X the price of a .com or that they sound backwards and confusing or that they scream “I couldn’t afford the .com!”, or their potential lack of SEO, or their lack of credibility, or the risk that the sponsoring registry can go under, or the fact that many of them sound similar and that both singulars and plurals will exist, but the point you are bringing up in this post is, by far, the NUMBER ONE reason to avoid gtlds. They will only help the guy who owns the .com version due to extreme and simultaneous leakage.
I feel safe in predicting that JohnSmith.Photography, JohnSmith.Guru, JohnSmith.Restaurant and JohnSmith.Tattoo will all leak traffic to their .com counterpart faster than an overflowing dirty diaper. So, while each of the poor gtld schlubs are shoveling out advertising money as quickly as possible to keep their gtld boats afloat, up to 61% of each one’s traffic will inadvertently visit the .com owner who has paid zilch in promotion. That 61% statistic, by the way, is not mine, but rather Overstock’s and was the number released by their board to explain their extreme disappointment in their “shortcut” experiment. ( Source: http://domainincite.com/7992-o-co-loses-61-of-its-traffic-to-o-com )
Out of every 13 prospective customers, 8 ended up elsewhere! What makes anyone think the same will not happen here?
Snoopy says
“When I visited Australia about a year and half ago, I couldn’t really tell which TLD was dominant.”
.com.au is dominant. Using .com is a very bad move for a local company without the .au.
Kassey says
.com has expanded from being a COMmercial extension for US companies only, to now being embraced by charity organizations, government agencies, presidential candidates, and many other countries, etc. Even Russia is using Soci2014.com for their Winter Olympics. So, the leakage problem may increase even more.