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A comment on Ask YC: What do you think of a .net domain?.

Re:Ask YC: What do you think of a .net domain? by astrec on Wednesday August 27, 2008 @11:01AM (#288084)
No doubt they'd love to own the .com, but generic name like that would be worth a fortune, and acquiring it would be a massive distraction.

Does it matter? I'll give you some real figures from one of our non .coms which is branded "ourdomain.tld"

All figures from Jul 27 - Aug 26.

  Total Visits: 4,702,217

  Type ins: 2,214,766 (47.10%)
  Google (organic): 926,313 (19.7%)
  Google (CPC): 390,382 (8.30%)
And then a very long tail featuring Yahoo (2%), Live (0.6%) and 1000s more.

Now for the interesting bit - of the keywords for those Google referrals:

  38% were for our brand name without TLD e.g ourdomain (in other words, "radar")
  33% were for a variant of our domain name e.g. ourdomain.tld, www.ourdomain.tld, ourdomain.ccTld etc.
So again, does it matter?

Obviously this is only data for one site so it's impossible to say anything conclusive, but my feeling is that by building a strong brand around the domain you own it doesn't matter too much whether it's a .net .

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask YC: What do you think of a .net domain? by maxklein on Wednesday August 27, 2008 @11:04AM (#288089)
So half of all users typed in the domain, even though it was not the .com? That's quite high. What's your firefox user percentage as a way to cross reference (an informal test for geekiness)?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask YC: What do you think of a .net domain? by astrec on Wednesday August 27, 2008 @11:09AM (#288094) 

  MSIE: 78.10%
  Firefox: 16.92%
  Safari: 3.84%
  Opera: 0.55%
Now I think about it, although type-ins is convenient marketing/analytics speak - and it's the label for that field in the report - it's a bit misleading as the total would include bookmarks.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask YC: What do you think of a .net domain? by maxklein on Wednesday August 27, 2008 @11:20AM (#288110)
That's good news then, as that's a very non-geeky audience.
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