The general public doesn’t know that domains can end something other than .com.
On November 22 I wrote an article about ICM Registry’s TV ad campaign. The ad campaign invited viewers to visit www.buy.xxx to learn more about the new .xxx domain extension.
The campaign reached a lot of eyeballs judging by the flood of traffic Domain Name Wire received from search engines.
But did people understand that Buy.xxx was a domain name, just like Buy.com is?
Some did, but there was a lot of leakage.
Michael Berkens has made note of a couple good data points. He owns BuyXXX.com, which has received a bunch of traffic. Also, Compete.com shows a spike in traffic to XXX.com.
Here’s another data point: the actual search terms people used to find the article on Domain Name Wire.
The good news is that 76% of the over 10,000 searches that meant to look for www.buy.xxx actually used that as the search term. They typed in www.buy.xxx or buy.xxx. (Why they didn’t type that into the address bar rather than the search box is a different matter).
But that leaves 24% of people that didn’t realize something other than .com could come after the dot.
www.buy.xxx.com and www.buyxxx.com each received 6% of the searches. (That would explain the flood of traffic to Berken’s buyxxx.com domain name.)
Other terms getting at least 100 searches include:
www.buyxxx
buyxxx.com
wwwbuyxxx.com
www.buy xxx
www.buy xxx.com
The numbers are striking, and applicants for new top level domains should keep them in mind.
I believe that over time people will understand that something other than .com (or a country code) can come after the dot. But it will take a while for many people to figure it out.
In the mean time, it wouldn’t hurt to buy second level .com domains that you think will be applied for at the top level.
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
Get Certified Parking Stats at DNW Certified Stats.
Related posts: