".US" versus ".BIZ"

[skeezix]

The domain name I want is only available with a US or a BIZ extension (or whatever it's called). Other than privacy not being allowed with domain names having .US, is there any advantage of one over the other?


(mysite.us versus mysite.biz)

(I ask this question here because of all the combined experience of a lot of website developers.)

[felgall]

If it were almost any country specific TLD other than .us then the decision would be relatively easy - you'd pick the country specific one if your site was targetting that country and the international .biz if you were aiming at an international audience. Those in the US prefer looking for international rather than local sites for their information and so .us is not somewhere they are likely to consider. Unfortunately .biz is quite a way down the list with the international TLDs though as well so it isn't going to do all that great either.

Of course if you can set the pages up to get high rankings in the Search Engine Results then the exact domain isn't going to make much difference anyway.

[KenJackson]

... Those in the US prefer looking for international rather than local sites for their information and so .us is not somewhere they are likely to consider. Huh?? Did you really write what you were thinking? Or did you get it backwards?


Of course if you can set the pages up to get high rankings in the Search Engine Results then the exact domain isn't going to make much difference anyway. Now that makes sense.

Personally, I think there are two categories of URLs: .com and everything else.
I say that because few non-technical people I talk with have any clue at all about URLs but they do seem to thing that .com URLs are normal.

[Early Out]

I think I know what he means... If someone is wondering what the URL is for the "whatsit" site, they'll try whatsit.com, then whatsit.net, then maybe whatsit.org or whatsit.biz. The .us domain isn't used very often, so people don't think to try it.

[felgall]

All the two character top level domains are country specific.

In Australia people are likely to automatically type .au onto the end of any domains that they expect to be specific to Australia and apart from really small countries and the USA I'd expect it would be very similar in most other countries as well.

All the top level domains having three or more letters with the exception of .gov and .edu (both of which are specific to the USA) are used internationally and are expected to target an international audience. About half of the web sites belonging to people in Australia use one of these international domains because their site targets an international rather than a local audience. Again the same would be true of most countries.

Any .com .net .org .biz .info etc domain is assumed by people around the world to be targetting them as part of the audience for that site since the assumption is that a site targetting people in a specific country should use a domain name specific to that country and a site using an international domain is expected to cater to an international audience.

So if people in Australia are looking for a whatsit web site they'll try whatsit.com.au first followed by whatsit.com, people in England would try whatsit.co.uk first followed by whatsit.com, and so on with the exception of small countries that have made their country specific domains available for international use and the USA where everyone goes straight for the international .com rather than the local .us

[KenJackson]

Oh, I see. You are considering .com as an international TLD.

I know that in Argentina, .com.ar sites abound as do .co.uk in UK, and I figured it would be similar in most other countries. For a while almost all .com sites were in the US, so I kind of think of all .com as US sites, even if they are owned and operated by foreign companies.

But to call .com an international TLD, there should be a corresponding .com.us or .co.us, which I've never seen any of. I know there is plain .us (I have one), but that's not an equivalent to a US version of .com.

[felgall]

Oh, I see. You are considering .com as an international TLD.

I know that in Argentina, .com.ar sites abound as do .co.uk in UK, and I figured it would be similar in most other countries. For a while almost all .com sites were in the US, so I kind of think of all .com as US sites, even if they are owned and operated by foreign companies.

But to call .com an international TLD, there should be a corresponding .com.us or .co.us, which I've never seen any of. I know there is plain .us (I have one), but that's not an equivalent to a US version of .com.

Well .com IS an international TLD. Probably half of the domains owned by Australians are .com domains particularly since to get a .com.au domain requires that you register the business first.

A minority of .com domains would belong to people from the US because everyone around the rest of the world use them to target international audiences.

What SLDs are set up within a country specific TLD would depend on the country. Australia set up .com.au specifically for business use. The UK has .co.uk and the only reason why .us wouldn't have similar is that every in the US have decided to target an international rather than a local market.

I always think of all .com sites as Australian sites since those domains are international in scope and Australia is as much a part of the territory they cover as anywhere else in the world. I don't really care where else they cover as long as they work for me. I am sure people elsewhere around the world think the same way. If you want to target a local area them using .com will get a lot of people annoyed at you for using an inappropriate domain.

[KenJackson]

If you want to target a local area them using .com will get a lot of people annoyed at you for using an inappropriate domain.
If that were true, most of the world would be annoyed at most of the internet.

Besides, the whole internet is divided more along language lines than region. You can hardly call the state of California local to us here on the east coast. In fact, most of the east cost isn't local to most of the east coast. Similarly, I wonder if people in Sydney consider Perth local.

[felgall]

If that were true, most of the world would be annoyed at most of the internet.

No because the vast majority of .com sites ARE perfectly usable from just about anywhere in the world. It is only a small percentage that are used inappropriately and those tend to be so far down the search results that few people ever see them.

I'd say that for every thousand .com sites I visit that only one of them is annoying because of its not working properly.

I'd say that over 80% of .com domains belong to people from outside the US and are therefore using them correctly to target an international audience. The majority of people using them from within the US are as well. After all the internet is world wide and the USA is only one of about 250 countries and no more important on the internet than any of the other countries that are also using the internet.

As for local or not, some web sites target a whole country while some target a small area within the country and in either case a country specific domain is appropriate. Some sites target the entire world while others only target some section of it such as Europe, Asia, the Americas etc where an international domain name would be appropriate even if you are not targetting everyone from everywhere. Where you are only targetting one or two countries though getting the country specific domains will be the most useful option and if you are going to get the .com it should be set up to redirect to the appropriate country site based on your visitor's actual location. At least that's how the sensible companies use it.

It is after all the WORLD wide web and despite what some Americans think, the USA is not only not the whole world, it isn't even the major part of the world - particularly when it comes to the web where the US is lagging behind many other countries in their web use.

[KenJackson]

It is after all the WORLD wide web and despite what some Americans think, the USA is not only not the whole world, it isn't even the major part of the world - particularly when it comes to the web where the US is lagging behind many other countries in their web use.
Did you intend to slam America?

[felgall]

Did you intend to slam America?

That comment isn't slamming America - it is just stating two facts.

1. that America only makes up a small part of the world - which is true as there are about 250 countries in the world of which America is one

and

2. That America is not the leading country when it comes to the way they use the web (the country which is would depend on exactly how you define leading country but few would put the USA in the number one spot). They are certainly behind many other countries regarding such things as percentage of the population with internet access and percentage of web users who keep their browser up to date (just to give two examples). For that matter America the web was invented in 1989 at CERN in Europe by Tim Berners-Lee so the US wasn't first country to use the web either (a third example of their not being the leading web country).

Neither of those facts slam America - they are just facts.

That most Americans creating web sites realise these facts and create sites that are usable by people from around the world demonstrates that those Americans at least are fully aware of those facts and that a lot of the people visiting their site will be from other countries which results in there being only a very few people who don't acknowledge the facts and who therefore mistakenly think that .com implies an American rather than an international site..

[KenJackson]

I don't want to take any due credit away from Tim Berners-Lee, but one has to wonder if there ever would have been an internet or WWW had it not been for the US.

If you're scraping around for little statistics like people keeping browsers up to date, that's a good sign. I know that some countries like Korea and Japan have huge bandwidths to the average home compared to the US, but that's a statement about stupid government regulations working against our own best interests.

I'm sure I could dig up facts that make Australia look bad, but there's no point in getting into a pissing contest over national superiority.

[felgall]

I'm sure I could dig up facts that make Australia look bad, but there's no point in getting into a pissing contest over national superiority.

That would be going completely off topic as all I was doing was pointing out that most people use .com domains for its intended international use (plus I never claimed Australia was superior in anything web related).

Since the US invented the internet in the first place and the web was designed as an easy way to use the internet as a replacement for gopher which was the best sharing protocol they'd had prior to that there of course wouldn't be an internet without the US. The very earliest TLDs were created back when the internet was a US only system which is why .gov, .mil and .edu are the three TLDs that are specific to the US even though they break the rule that applies to all other three and more character TLDs of being for international use.

[bluehostbuddy]

I'd say that over 80% of .com domains belong to people from outside the US...

I'd say you are incorrect.

Here are the top ten distribution of .com domains by country.

1.....US......50,111,248
2.....DE.......3,704,605
3.....UK.......2,694,815
4.....CA.......2,665,047
5.....CN.......2,493,297
6.....AU.......2,160,597
7.....FR.......1,712,526
8.....HK.......1,537,098
9.....JP...........942,610
10...ES...........903,522

From here. (http://www.webhosting.info/registries/reports/country/COM?pi=1&ob=RANK&oo=ASC)

[felgall]

Okay, I was just estimating it based on sites I'd actually seen as I hadn't seen any figures on it before and never knew that there would be any way of telling what country domains are registered from let alone that anyone would actually be able to capture such info. I don't know how that site could obtain those figures in the first place and I suspect that they are probably just as inaccurate as some of the other stats I've seen that dump a lot into the USA bucket in their stats that really belongs spread across the others. I don't have any evidence that those figures are wrong though and so I'll accept them as correct subject to my getting further info on where the figures came from.

According to those figures the USA has registered just over 50% of the .com domains. That isn't a significant enough difference from my 20% estimate to affect any of the rest of what I said though. The .com domains are intended for international use and the vast majority of .com sites work perfectly well for that international audience.

[skeezix]

Well, the site I had in mind is really a local site, because only folks within a 25-mile radius would ever have need of its services. I was just asking in case there was some negative connotation to .US or .BIZ.

I agree with the person who said there're .com sites and then there's all the rest...

[bluehostbuddy]

According to those figures the USA has registered just over 50% of the .com domains.

I'd say you are incorrect again.

Total US .com domain names 50,111,248 from here (http://www.webhosting.info/registries/reports/country/COM?pi=1&ob=RANK&oo=ASC).
Total .com domain names world wide 77,448,234 from here (http://www.webhosting.info/registries/).

So ((50,111,248/77,448,234)*100 = 64.70289 %

And this data proves the US has 64.70289 % of all .com domain names.

Like you said in one of your earlier posts. I am just stating the facts. :)

[felgall]

I'd say you are incorrect again.

Total US .com domain names 50,111,248 from here (http://www.webhosting.info/registries/reports/country/COM?pi=1&ob=RANK&oo=ASC).
Total .com domain names world wide 77,448,234 from here (http://www.webhosting.info/registries/).

So ((50,111,248/77,448,234)/100 = 64.70289 %

And this data proves the US has 64.70289 % of all .com domain names.

Like you said in one of your earlier posts. I am just stating the facts. :)

Well the site also has a graph showing total .com domains just under 100,000,000 so the various pages of stats on the site don't even agree. Those figures are probably invented ones anyway as there is no way anyone can tell where in the world a domain was really registered from. It is far more likely that its a list of where the registrars are located that the domains are registered with as that's probably as close as you can get with identifying locations for domains. If that is what they are using as the source for their stats then they are including all the registrations with US registrars from around the world in their US stats - which would explain why that figure looks to be about 5 times bigger than I would expect.

After all how would anyone know how many of the .com domain's registered with BlueHost belong to people outside the USA? I doubt BlueHost would provide that info to anyone even if they were capturing it themselves which they probably are not.

[bluehostbuddy]

Well the site also has a graph showing total .com domains just under 100,000 so the various pages of stats on the site don't even agree. Those figures are probably invented ones anyway as there is no way anyone can tell where in the world a domain was really registered from. It is far more likely that its a list of where the registrars are located that the domains are registered with as that's probably as close as you can get with identifying locations for domains. If that is what they are using as the source for their stats then they are including all the registrations with US registrars from around the world in their US stats - which would explain why that figure looks to be about 5 times bigger than I would expect.


I'd say you are incorrect once again.

Could you please give a link where the site shows a graph of "100,000" total .com domains. There are 50,111,248 listed just for the US.

You really have proven my point by the way you carelessly handle data and guess at what you would like believe.
When you are able to substantiate any of your points with examples of pertinent data, I would love to continue this conversation at that time. :) But as for now, as far as I am concerned, there is no value of continuing this discussion. :D

[felgall]

Just checked what those stats are saying and there were just over 50,000,000 .com domains purchased from registrars in the USA. That confirms my original feeling that those figures were not related to what I was saying at all. Just because 65% of .com buyers bought their domains from the USA doesn't contradict my guess that 80% of them don't live there.

There are not going to be any statistics on what countries the buyers are located in since even where the domain registrars know they wouldn't be making that info available to anyone else.

I'd expect that in most countries the cost of buying a .com domain from a local registrar will be significantly more than buying from a US based registrar (it is about 25% dearer to buy one from an Australian based registrar than from a US based one so the difference is significant enough) and so a fair number of .com purchases in any country will involve buying from the US simply to save paying that extra money for nothing. Obviously the number buying from the US must be lower than the number buying locally at least on average since if 50% of people in each country were buying their .com's from the US then the statistics wouldn't leave any for US based buyers at all (just goes to show people don't always research prices properly before buying or everyone would buy from the cheapest registrar - probably one in the US). If 1/3 of all buyers buy from the US rather than locally (which seems a reasonable figure to use for an average given price differences plus the fact that some countries wouldn't have a local .com registrar) that would give leave figure for .com domains owned by people in the USA of about 25,000,000 or about 30% of the total .com domains with the other figures in those stats being about 50% higher in each case. Not all that far off my original guess (given that I was only trying to indicate that it is probable that a good deal more than half of .com domains are owned from outside the US).

Of course that 1/3 figure is just a guess on my part again since there is no way of knowing what the true figures are but I'd expect that the correct figure is probably higher than that rather than lower. Certainly .com ownership is nowhere near as lopsided as those figures on where the registrars are located would suggest.

[walker]

So if people in Australia are looking for a whatsit web site they'll try whatsit.com.au first followed by whatsit.com, people in England would try whatsit.co.uk first followed by whatsit.com....

Erm, nope.

dot COMs are, and always have been, the number one preference for businesses in the UK, with .co.uk's often not being registered at all. The UK (and therefore .co.uk domains) encapsulates England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland btw, so I'm not sure why you homed in on England there.

bbc.com, sky.com, itv.com, theregister.com, nat-west.com, etc. The list of UK businesses with a .com is endless. My local newspaper (with a circulation under 10,000), has a .com but not a .co.uk. So I think it's fair to say that most web surfers will take a pop at a dot COM before a dot co dot uk. The UK companies that have a .co.uk but not a .com usually took that route due to somebody squatting on the .com of their business name.

Most of the mainstream sites used by UK citizens for social & entertainment purposes have a dot com so that domain extension is far more familiar to them than .co.uk, and that's partly why .com's are most coveted by UK businesses.

Also due to Nominet UK's greed & stupidity, .co.uk's were so expensive in the UK until about ten years ago that it made more economic sense for everybody to get a .com, .net or .org. For that reason, .co.uk's never got mainstream enough, and .com's became firmly associated with the internet in the British psyche.

.co.uks are pretty much seen as the poor man's choice thesedays.

"Oh, the .com and .net domains were taken then?" <_<