What we learned from .ORG about new gTLD´s

Since everybody iscurrently trying to figure out if new TLD´s will be a success or not, toregister them or not, which ones one should invest, I might have an interestingobservation here for you. 

Domainindex was recently asked to perform a research among companies andorganizations for a customer on various domain related topics and one of thequestions was about the interest of companies and organizations in their .comdomain name (which they all did not own). 

So we contactedcompanies and organizations operating with a ccTLD (in 11 different ccTLD´s) orgTLD (in 7 different gTLD´s).

We selected from alist of 3 Mio domains and reached out to about 17.000 companies andorganizations, we made 5500 calls with the owners or at least the person incharge for domain acquisitions (yes this was a big operation for us).

So these are the results:

In the ccTLD, all Ican say is that the interest was high in the .com names but there have been theusual reasons why they have never been able to get it (to expensive or anothercompany of the same name on it etc.)

The owners of domainsin .info,.biz,.co,.asia,.eu usually are very small businesses, they would likethe.com version of their domain name, however they are not even willing to paya few hundred dollars for their .com which usually would cost in the thousandsor 10,000, so far so good. 

Amazingly it turns out the .net zone contains an incredible high number of verylow quality sites, I always had the feeling it's lower quality but afterevaluating the top 150,000.net domains by European and American traffic I mustsay we have been amazed with the extremely low number of quality sites under.net 

Very different is the .org zone, first of all the quality of sites in generalis very high. The density of quality organizations and businesses among the top150,000 .org domains ranked by international traffic was higher than in anyother  gTLD or ccTLD (besides .com). We found 25,000 reputableorganizations and businesses. What was really interesting is this: aftercalling about 500 from the top .org sites that do not own their .com domain itturns out that they are all perfectly happy with their .org domain name andhave no interest in the.com. 

What that means to me is that those new gTLDs that really succeed to brandthemselves as something special, within a community or a particular kind of organizationhave great chances to become popular and successful up to a point where theircustomers might prefer the .org over the .com version. But it also shows thatthose that do not succeed will be populated with spam, porn and low-qualitysites.