Dominers have discussed the issue for years.
What is the bleed over from a an advertised extension other than .com to the .com due to the fact that users often default to a .com since its the best known extension.
Now I know for sure.
27,000 visitors.
On a sleepy Sunday morning, the last day of the winter Olympic games, the CBS morning show did a 5 minute piece on the Move Your Money movement highlighting MoveYourMoney.info (you can watch the piece on that site)
If your not familiar with this movement, let me fill you in as a way of background.
In December Arrinna Huffington of the Huffington Post, fed up with big banks polices of high interest rate credit cards, pulling credit lines, charging high fees while offering savers almost no interest, started the movement, telling people they should take their business from the big banks and move there money to smaller community banks and credit unions.
She also started the Move Your Money project on Facebook.com, which now has over 33,000 fans.
The domain MoveYourMoney.info was registered in December under privacy.
We registered MoveYourMoney.com years ago.
So now back to Sunday.
The CBS show mentioned the site moveyourmoney.info during the piece and even showed the site.
However internet users tendency to naturally default to the .com, caused in this case, over 27,000 visitors to go to the .com up from just 175 visitors the Sunday before.
So note to the proponents of the new extensions, please develop and promote all these alternative extensions you want.
.com owners can’t wait.
Any idea how many visitors the .Info site had i.e. the percentage of traffic loss?
Leonard
I have no idea.
You can check compete and alexa for the .com and .info and compare
just because the .com got 27k visitors doesnt mean the .info lost all 27k visitors. that is what domainers dont understand. there are quite a few websites that i visit that are not .com and every once in awhile when i accidently type in the .com i immediately realize i am not on the site i need so then i just go straight to the regular site. i am sure a lot of the 27k people who went to the .com eventually ended up on the .info.
moveyourmoney.org gets almost 10,000 people a month … registered 2 months ago
.org is the natural fit here next to .com
why they choose .info is beyond me.
@nr
It doesn’t matter where they went after. They still went to the .com first. If the .com had something that caught their fancy, they would have easily been distracted from going to the .info.
Nr
We will never know how many people went to .info eventually or not.
I know how many people stayed on the .com, clicked links and the number was a considerable percentage.
moveyourmoney dot me and dot tv are available for hand reg 🙂
Mike,
Didn’t they try to buy it from you. Huffington is loaded. And she’s been making the rounds with this pitch.
Owen
No not an e-mail.
Did any of those 27K people email you via the “Enquire about this domain?” If so, that would be interesting to know as well if you don’t mind sharing.
Sean
No I did not get one e-mail , but they did click around quite a bit.
Mike,
Good to see this proof.
I have been letting non-.com domains drop. Some I don’t have the .com and some I do.
I’m figuring that I don’t need the .com and the .whatever. Let someone pick up the .whatever domains and maybe they’ll develop it which would only add value to my .com.
1. I get the traffic bleed.
2. If a .whatever gets really successful, they are going to want to buy the .com
So, think about dropping your .whatever domains if you own the .com and you just might jack up the value of your .com.
Rob
I think you make an excellent argument for not grabbing every extension.
If you grab every extension of your .com your insuring that anyone is going to have to use something completely different and thereby insuring you don’t get bleed over traffic.
One of the best things that can happen to your .com is having someone develop the same domain in another extension.
“i am sure a lot of the 27k people who went to the .com eventually ended up on the .info.”
//////////////////////////
It is a bit of an unknown, but that typo traffic is lost revenue to the other site. Whatever is being sold on the correct site some will buy it on the typo’d site.
I guess the question is why start with a domain that is confusing in the first place? I think alot of the time it comes down to bad decision making.
I would be interested in knowing what your bounce rate was?
Impressive, Mike.
@Chef Patrick
So’s MoveYourMoneyTO dot me. 😛
I love real world numbers. I would venture to say that the .info itself received less than 27,000 visitors. I agree with your last comment about all the other extensions. I can’t wait either. Their advertising budget is going to be split with the .com owners for eternity. The death of .com has been highly exaggerated. Everything that is happening will only reinforce .com. My advice is promote the hell out of any new extension, as long as you own the .com as well. The future is arriving right on schedule!
Mike, congrats on the traffic surge! I don’t want you to see you become a .info hater. Traffic bleed is a reality, yes. But a fair number of non-com extensions are successful, and needed. This is fact.
Back to the .com is awesome sentiment! 😉
Mike … congrats again 🙂
Here is another perfect real world example:
I own, and have developed, a geo domain for the city in Panama where I live: http://www.CascoViejo.org.
A friend of mine, who for 5 years has refused to sell me the .COM, has nothing but a landing page on http://www.CascoViejo.com.
We have advertised, marketed and promoted our .ORG site quite extensively here.
However, despite banners all over showing the URL and display ads, etc…we are still losing about 20% of our traffic to my friend’s .COM.
That being said, I am still a big fan of the .ORG extension when it comes to pure Geo domains (City names, region names, attraction names, country names, etc…).
Thanks Mike…great example and support of the future of .COM.
About 2 years ago, I had a couple of my .com names start getting big traffic. I found that non-dot-coms of those 2 names were developed.
Now I have almost 50 or perhaps more of my dot-coms getting traffic just because someone developed either an org, net, .mobi, or .us or .info etc.
This year I have already dropped 65% of my non-dot coms and the remaining non-dot-coms are going to be dropped in next few months as their expiry dates come along.
I don’t have dot-com for all of these I am dropping, but what the hack some one will pick up these non-dot-coms and develop some and many corresponding dot-com owners will get traffic.
I am cutting my renewal fees and just happy that my portfolio now is over 95% dot-com. Last year I was at 78% dot-com and rest other TLDs.
And just like Rob said above, it will also have others buy the corresponding dot-com from me or they will just keep losing the traffic to me.
Imagine in a couple of years, there will be 100s of new TLDs and if you have dot-com, and you just get 1% bleed thru traffic from every developed other tld of your dot-com…..you will probably get more traffic withOUT developing your dot-com than any other tld of it developed.
🙂
My goal is to be 100% dot-com by end of this year. No other TLDs at all.
I know it will work because it is already working for me 🙂
rkb,
good strategy. I have been dropping my .whatever domains too.
Sounds like .com is increasing in value and .whatever is decreasing in value.
Not that this is a real shock to anyone but having this discussion on Mike’s site is increasing the spread in valuation.
10-4 but I don’t think I would have told that one. :>
P.S. Dot Com rules. All that other stuff is just noise.
I have to disagree big time with this one:
[i]”I think you make an excellent argument for not grabbing every extension.
If you grab every extension of your .com your insuring that anyone is going to have to use something completely different and thereby insuring you don’t get bleed over traffic.
One of the best things that can happen to your .com is having someone develop the same domain in another extension.”[/i]
I think that is terrible, terrible advice for anyone doing anything beyond parking. Why would anyone possibly want someone else to be able to cause confusion and competition in the marketplace? I have a great .com of a tourist region and I know I benefit from the marketing activities of the local tourist board who owns the .org – but I can tell you my life would be much, much better if I owned the .org and the .net.
Traffic leakage may be nice, but it doesn’t beat out competition and marketplace confusion.
Gordon
If you own the .com your not going to get much bleed over to any other extension.
The problem is when you don’t own the .com and develop the site out.
Mike – sure you won’t “bleed” much to the other extensions, but that doesn’t mean the other extensions can’t be developed into a major competitor to your site, or that they won’t somehow cause confusion with visitors or customers.
Telling someone not to spend $24 per year on the other extensions in hope that a possible competitor emerges, builds out their site and then bleeds traffic to you doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
I am all aboard the .COM ship…however, you still can not discount the value of a .ORG in particular situations like Geo, NGO’s, “Green”, Science, etc…(increasing value I might add – according to most recent report the registry on median sales prices of .net, .org, .com).
So I’m reading your post and thinking to myself, “hey, don’t I have a domain like that”?
Indeed, I have a domain similar to MoveYourMoney.com, except it has two hyphens in it. I picked it up back in the day because it used to have a web site. So I just logged into my Parked account and found that, on the same day MoveYourMoney.info was mentioned, I got 400 visitors to my domain. It usually gets 1 or 2 a day.
I also recall now receiving an “inquire about this domain” message on that same day with someone inquiring about moving money. Now it all makes sense.
Gordon
Unless your parking your domains
MHB – right, parking that makes more sense.
Nice report. I think the reason why com has been popular and will remain so is based mental laziness. The concept has been repeatedly proven in studies by social psychologists. People tend to use various cognitive ‘shortcuts’ (heuristics) when making quick decisions and this report is an example of how the com is the “standard” web address people default to because they are not consciously thinking “ok so what was at the end of that website address…?” I think this pretty much sums up the popularity of coms, it’s not an inherent quality in the extension itself, rather its because the extension has developed into the stereotypical standard web address. Heuristic thinking is becoming more popular due to information overload and the human tendency to preserve mental energy,
One of the highest authority and most visited websites in the world is a .ORG – Wikipedia. This leekage of traffic due to typing the wrong TLD is really dependent upon a number of factors. Some on here have pointed out how a .ORG is great for Geo domains, etc… and that’s very true. But there is another phenomena which has actually been studied and made available at Marketing Sherpa and broken down by age demographics. It illustrates that many older people, like baby boomers for example, are more apt to use a .COM out of habit even if the actual TLD is a .ORG or .whatever, whereas many teens are more apt to remember if a different TLD was used beside .COM and will use it. As another commenter mentioned I’d like to know what your bounce rate stats show.
Look at Quantcast for both the .info and your .com at the 1-week time range.
They’re estimating, but not far off your number. Assuming a similar margin of error on the .info, they show the .info getting about 10x the visitors of the .com.
i cant disagree with whats being said, except to say that 1) i dont think this would hold as true for long established ccTLDs like .co.uk, .de, .com.au, when marketed inside their country, but really only for the gTLDs. and 2) was going to make a similar point to what Eric just mentioned about demographic … anyone who visited the site after this commercial was at least old enough to have a bank account, and I would venture to say leaning more toward the over 30 bracket than the 18 – 29/college crowd, and I think that what he mentioned about the Marketing Sherpa study seems intuitive, that there is a gap where the younger the generation has more exposure, recognition, and recall for different TLDs. Still for the most part this case study has a lot of impact. thanks for sharing it.
“I would venture to say that the .info itself received less than 27,000 visitors”
Presuming you’re hinting that the incorrect .com received more visitors over the correct .info during the same time period (when it was mentioned on TV), I’d be willing to wager a substantial amount of money that you’re wrong.
We always develop .com first and make an effort to obtain a suitable .com name that matches our development ideas, however, I don’t think that developing an extension other than .com is nearly as “bad” as some people make it out to be- “some people” being passive portfolio holders from the domain stone age who’ve been unproductively holding great keyword .com names and thusly, have enormous incentive to fabricate nonobjective rationale that dissuades anyone from using anything other than what they already own (and wouldn’t mind selling, if the price is right)
I agree that traffic bleed is real and .com is king, however, as another user mentioned, traffic bleed- just like type in traffic- is very demographic dependent and further, is rarely significant enough to warrant throwing the brakes on an entire project. If I develop a site on a .org that generates 1mm uniques per year, why should I care if the ‘domainer’ wasting the .com on a parking page is getting benefited with some extra traffic? The answer is: I don’t. Most of those users will find their way to back me anyway and rarely make the same navigation mistake twice, particularly when confronted with a no-content, zero user experience clicky page on the .com. It’s a bad, bad idea to try and outperform a fully developed .com name using an eponymous domain on a lower TLD, however, if the .com is sitting there parked, then there are no worries. The relevance of the .com is being squandered for nickles and dimes on parking, so develop away… The .com owner will get his nickels as a few accidentally stumble his way, but the users with their wallets open will find their way to your content driven site.
I’ll give you the mindshare inherent to .com and whatever traffic bleed occurs whenever someone develops a lesser TLD and a few users wind up on your parking page, I’ll take productive development and dominating the search engines. Ready, set, go.
re: the age demographics….it is safe to say that just about everyone watching the early show on Sunday morning is pretty much 40+
She moved her money alright.
Into your wallet.
Sweet
Hi, can you tell me which parking program you use?
Joha
Smartnames.com
VehicleAccident.com doesn’t appear in the top 500 of Google results on keyword search “vehicle accident,” but vehicleaccident.net is on page 1. Sheetpiles.net is page 1 on Google search for exact keywords, with or without quotes, for a billion dollar industry with 8 sponsored links, but the sheetpiles.com isn’t in the top 200 or more – I didn’t want to search – because it is parked. As the expression, “dot com is king,” so “content is king.”
Maybe .info is a tough sell because it is four letters, instead of 3 or fewer. Maybe four letter extensions, like .info and .mobi, are the tipping point. Wonder how .tv is doing . . .
@ Louise
I think the idea here is more direct navigation as opposed to serps. Like I said before coms have evolved into the stereotypical “website address” so when people type in a url, if they’re not internet savvy, used to typing in that address or consciously alert at that exact moment, they’ll probably type in the url with a com at the end (as opposed to info for example). Now whether or not they’ll click on something once they land on the page, in my opinion depends on how net savvy they are. More skilled users typically recognize parked pages for what they are now days, and do not often click on the links. Casual users may click on a link as long as it relates to what they were looking for. Either way development of some sort, and moving away from standard parking will benefit the domain owner.
Additionally many users these days (both savvy and casual) type in urls directly into the search engine, rather than the address bar.
This is my first visit to your site and I find the above article quite refreshing and informative.
We always develop .com first and make an effort to obtain a suitable .com name that matches our development ideas
One of the highest authority and most visited websites in the world is a .ORG
and not .com
Is Good to see this proof. Thanks MHB
Honestly, all this really says is that there needs to be a change in marketing strategies in print and tv/commercials. This can be avoided in the future with really highlighting the ‘dot-info’ in its marketing.
All of this is interesting. However, in terms of SEO is it difficult to promote a .info website. Godaddy is giving them away with a purchase of a .com. I mean if it is more difficult to get a .info on the 1st page I don’t want it. If I can get it to occupy one of the SERPs I am happy. I don’t care if it makes money. I care about to blocking out my competition.
It holds true for everything.
This is why the .CO will NEVER be successful. I would bet my life savings on that in a heart beat.
I will have to agree with Gordon, in that, unless you’re parking domains, not buying other TLDs in order to get traffic bleed over isn’t the best idea. Instead, why not get quality traffic thats actually looking for what you have to offer? I would rather beat out the competition than co-exist with em. =)
How to find the Best Penny Stocks to Buy
I have just acquired a .info domain and you guys are scaring me. I am planning of abandoning it
I’d say .info’s are worth about the same as .co & .mobi domains.
I’m not buying into this.
I call BS – I’ve successfully got a non .com site to the first spot.
Supposed to just take your word for this? Where’s the proof?
Bare
“”Supposed to just take your word for this?”””
Yes you are
I don’t buy it MHB – most people use Google now and know better than to just type in their keyword in the toolbar directly.
@Exxon Mobil credit card
We see this all the time.
People don’t search for a URL once they know it (or think they know it).