It was just a few days ago that we reported on visitor numbers to Buy.xxx.
At that time they had recorded over 500,000 visitors.
According to Google Analytics which ICM shared with me as of yesterday, total visitors to date, to Buy.XXX is right over 3.7 Million.
Of the 3.7 million, the online ad campaign, which is actually directed to the URL; go.buy.xxx, got 2.5 Million visitors meaning that over 1.2 million visitors were generated from traditional offline media including television, billboards & magazines.
Alexa.com is now showing Buy.xxx to be almost breaking the top 1,000 sites in terms of traffic worldwide as you can see from the chart below and the percentage 70%-30% between go.buy.xxx to buy.xxx is also supported by Alexa (although for some reason Alexa shows 68%-41.5% which adds up t0 110%)
In any case its a ton of traffic just less than one week into its full ad campaign.
I’d be curious to know how they detect a visitor to be from “type-ins”, given that a Javascript popup will also have no referrer…..
I had the same question, too, George.
Furthermore, if one uses the Google Trends tool, there is no data for “buy.xxx” as a search term (and if I recall correctly, there *was* for GoDaddy.com when they had their Superbowl commercial, as one can verify by looking back at the Google Trends stats). Of course, Google.co disappeared from the radar soon thereafter, and Buy.xxx will likely prove to be at most a “blip” (just like the entire .co extension, if one goes by traffic stats).
There’s another way to assess traffic, namely by looking at the root-servers.org statistics for the L-root (public stats are available for that one). I’ll put a link in the next message, so that this message isn’t hit by the moderation queue.
How many people are going there thinking its a place to buy porn buy.xxx..kinda makes it sound like that.
Just to followup on my prior comment, one can check the popularity of various TLDs using the root zone stats. For the past week:
http://dns.icann.org/cgi-bin/dsc-grapher.pl?binsize=60&window=604800&plot=qtype_vs_all_tld&server=Lroot
.co doesn’t make the chart, and neither does .xxx. TLDs like .eu, .cz, and .biz DO make the chart, albeit near the bottom (there’s a headline for you “.biz is more popular than .co” — Sorry, Robert Cline, LOL)
Non-existent and invalid TLDs (like .home or .local) rank higher than .biz, though. 🙂
(I previously wrote an article “Most Popular Invalid TLDs Should be Reserved”, which used the same stats, see http://www.circleid.com/posts/20090618_most_popular_invalid_tlds_should_be_reserved/ Suddenly making invalid TLDs resolve could be a major security issue.)
Oops, I meant “GoDaddy.co” in my earlier message, not GoDaddy.com and Google.com. Major typos, easy to make in a .com world!
i’d be more interested to know how much traffic buyxxx.com is getting.
Buyxxx.com does not seem to be getting any traffic according to Alexa
Looks like Mike is near the computer, approving comments. So here’s a couple of links:
Google Trends for “godaddy.co” for 2011:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=godaddy.co&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2011&sort=0
Notice the spike, and then it disappeared completely. For buy.xxx, in the past 30 days:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=buy.xxx&ctab=0&geo=all&date=mtd
No data whatsover (i.e. Your terms – buy.xxx – do not have enough search volume to show graphs.). In comparison, porno.com in the past 30 days:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=porno.com&ctab=0&geo=all&date=mtd
does register with stats. Yet, buy.xxx, which is supposedly getting “massive type-ins” doesn’t generate anything on Google Trends? It doesn’t make sense to me.
George
That’s interesting but we are talking about one domain in a TLD, one that hasn’t even launched yet.
I don’t see .me on the chart either but I still got the $450K in the bank for mine.
looking root servers stats is only a way to look at traffic to the root servers. most lookup traffic for existing tld’s (should, in theory, for various reasons) never reach those servers.
True, Mike, but the buyer of your .me was likely not buying it for its traffic.
Do you notice that sellers of .co or .cm never ever talk about all the traffic they’re getting??!!?? Folks *know* that .com is where the traffic is, and that it won’t bleed to other extensions. Every other TLD (existing and any forthcoming ones) will always face that obstacle.
Congrats on selling meet.me ….but one will find it hard to repeat that success. If you had to invest $1 million on actual content and marketing of a website, would you put on a .me or .xxx or a .co? I think most of us would not, unless we had a billion in the bank and really didn’t care about losing 100% of our investment.
Investing in alternative TLDs is like throwing money into a slot machine. While there’s a few winners, you know that the “house” has a huge advantage. The smart thing to do is not to even play those machines at all, but find investments where you have a positive *expected* ROI.
It’s “exciting” to some to throw money into a game where the expected ROI is negative, and come out ahead. I’ll take the boring route and invest in activities where the expected ROI is positive from the get-go (i.e. high quality .com domains that I can build upon).
f5: Yes, but there’s certainly a correlation between the popularity of a TLD, and the amount of traffic that the TLD receives at the root servers.
Buyxxx.com? This doesn’t look very good…
george: as long as you know the limitations there’s no harm.
i’m no dns guru but is there some reason xxx, unlike all the other afilias managed tlds, has to have recursion enabled? what’s special about xxx?
can you take Alexa chart to the bank ??
FX: Do a Google search for “vanity metrics”. 🙂
Dear Mr. Kirikos,
Thank you so much for your analysis; I always learn so much from you.
I don’t believe Alexa has the ability to track or count type ins from what I found.
surely domainers arent falling for this and regging any are they? at high xx a pop or more?
also they are paying for traffic by their campaigns
when they stop paying for advertising the traffic will drop like a stone
are people registering domains who visit?
i would imagine in a year or two when the drops happen, the drops will be catastrophic
the beauty of a normal domain and extension like .com or a cctld is they can be used for ANYTHING
news, travel, ecommerce
.xxx has one use , and laws will only get stricter and stricter
also,too funny
http://whois.domaintools.com/buyxxx.com
no doubt alexa = vanity metrics. Good one George !
It’s stupid to quote Alexa #s to people that understand traffic stats, esp domainers.
George, as far as google analytics goes.
You can set up source trackers to know exactly how much popunder traffic from tubes was sent vs direct traffic vs seo vs link traffic. If you dont set trackers, anything that’s cant not be easily identified is combined into direct traffic. Even if you have seo traffic, tracked traffic, refferal traffic.. your direct traffic will still go up as not everything can be accurately tracked. If that’s not enough, Google Analytics does not count about 15% of all traffic. That’s a limited of a java script.
I think we have also learned that people who visit porn sites are more likely to inadvertently have the Alexa toolbar/plugin/whatever installed.
George, with google trends you should be checking website trends and not search trends. that one is always few weeks behind.
Rick, alexa has no problem tracking type ins. You just shouldn’t be using Alexa to tell you type in counts.
The only think ALexa is semi useful for is trend lines and few other traffic composition data, but thats about it Even at that i can point you to about a dozen sites that lost major traffic during Panda or Mayday and alexa moved nowhere.
Point of this thread, Alexa is useless. It’s a vanity metric and nothing else.
As much as ALexa is useless, i gotta admit we use it daily. However we also use 5 other tools to give us a better understanding of what it is we’re looking at.
There *is* a term that does show up in Google Trends as increasing…..try the term XXX.com 🙂 LOL
Check its Alexa stats, too!
BTW, RegistrarStats.com will apparently have the .xxx registration counts based on the zone file starting in December (zone file isn’t available until then). Then folks can independently verify the registrations.
i can think of at least one dns-based way to track type-ins with reasonable reliability, if you are running the nameserver, as icm is.
i’ve always thought alexa toolbar just counts GET’s. because there are ad servers in the “top 100 sites”.
f5: That will only count total DNS lookups. It won’t break them down by how those lookups were generated, i.e. by direct type-ins, links, bots/spiders/crawlers, etc.
Lawley already admitted they bought popunder traffic and since popunder traffic caries no HTTP Referrer, it looks just like typein traffic to Alexa. In other words: they have been artificially inflating their numbers.
Guys
I’m not sure what the issue is.
The internet ads account for 70% of the traffic, that’s what Google Analytics show. That traffic is going to go.buy.xxx
30% or 1.2 million visits came to buy.xxx which was generated by the traditional media ad spend.
The TV ads started Thursday night.
Tonight is Tuesday
The Google stats I saw are were through yesterday.
I brought up Alexa not to say its the end all and be all of stats but to say it backs up the Google Analytics I saw on buy.xxx.
Any way you slice it, its a ton of traffic in a few days.
Of course we will see how effective all that traffic and the media blitz is when GA opens and we see the numbers.
@george: exactly. which is why the “value” of alexa has always been a mystery to me. it’s focused on what the browser is doing (and with the usual browsers, much of that is out of the user’s control), not what the user is doing.
i think stardom has summed it up. when the ad campaign ends, so too does the traffic.
icm could measure type-in’s via their nameserver but, all dues respect, i’m not sure they know how.
Just to followup, Google Trends is now showing some searches for “buy.xxx”, as per the prior links. However, the number of searches seems very low, i.e. if you do a Google Trends search with multiple terms separated by a comma, e.g.:
buy.xxx,porno.com,sex.com
one can can see that buy.xxx isn’t getting as much as one would expect, relative to domains that we *know* get type-in traffic. Thus, I’d conclude based on that data that the traffic is mostly from the popups on websites, and not from direct navigation (i.e. not coming from the TV ads).
When the registry sends out a “mission accomplished” statement that the TV ads are done (gotta preserve cash for the lawsuit), we’ll probably see the Google Trends charts for buy.xxx drop to GoDaddy.CO levels (i.e. non-existent on GoDaddy.CO of late, after the Superbowl spike).