Thoughts about .co domains ad during the Super Bowl
Just watched a commercial for .co domains during the Super Bowl and I am slightly worried about how this will be perceived by the general public. The .co domain extension is intended for commercial use by businesses and other commercial entities. I also expect that .co will cause some confusion as people find these domains mistyping the .com domain. Is this good for the domain industry? Probably not.
The commercial didn’t address what .co domains are, or what they are intended to do. It did promote the GoDaddy girls and their sexy image. If you are going to use Super Bowl commercials to teach the masses about a new product, I would expect you want to teach a little about the product you are selling. Did Joan teach us anything? Do you know any more about .co by watching the commercials?
I will be interested to see how this plays our for .co domains over the next few weeks.
Why choose a .com over other domains
Just a quick thought and observation….
I own a HTC Android phone, Apple iTouch, Apple iPad, and a blackberry. They all have slightly different keyboards and all have some level of web browsing. The one constant is they all have a key/button/shortcut to include the .com after typing in a web address!
There is no denying that these mobile devices are becoming more popular, and every day more and more people are using mobile devices to search this crazy network of tubes. Every time I am typing in a web address into one of these mobile devices I am almost forced to use the .com domain or take the time to type out whatever other top level domain I feel like surfing to.
My portfolio contains a lot of other domain extensions. I use a lot of .us and .org for different reasons, but mostly because the search engines claim they do not care what TLD you use for your website. So using these TLDs means I can get a relevant domain name without dealing with someone who many already own the name in .com. I don’t have any problem with the other extensions, because in search, all domains are said to be created equal. But .com still rules over all in mind-share and on mobile devices.