Digital Pandit
Well-Known Member
It occurred to me recently that my regular coverage of companies that choose to abandon their unused dot-brand gTLDs may have created a misleading impression that the dot-brand portion of the new gTLD program has been a big old waste of time.
I make no apologies for this. As a news guy, I look for deviations from the norm — “man bites dog” stuff — when deciding what to write about, and that quite often means reporting what could be considered Bad News.
When companies do adopt their dot-brands in a big way, they tend to do it rather quietly and almost always in a foreign language, so the news doesn’t usually cross my radar until long after it has ceased to be timely.
But it is true that the background noise of dot-brands is that quite a lot of them are being actively used to varying degrees, and I’m feeling some sense of obligation to report on that activity too, despite it being thoroughly un-newsworthy.
So here I present an unofficial list of the top 10 most-used dot-brands.
It’s based on how many active web sites I’ve found in each of the 460-odd dot-brand gTLDs I regularly spider.
I count a “dot-brand” as any gTLD that has Specification 13 in its ICANN contract, and here I’m defining an active web site to exclude redirects to sites in other, off-brand TLDs.
The numbers may not be precisely accurate today, because sites come and go, but I think they’re a decent guide.
I’m also fairly certain that “number of active web sites” is an absolutely terrible way to compare and rank dot-brands, but if nothing else I think the metric is a good indicator of enthusiasm for dot-brands (by the brand, if not necessarily its customers).
Here goes.
.seat — SEAT, S.A.
.lamborghini — Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A.
.bmw — Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft
.weber — Saint-Gobain Weber SA
.bnpparibas — BNP Paribas
Read the full post here
I make no apologies for this. As a news guy, I look for deviations from the norm — “man bites dog” stuff — when deciding what to write about, and that quite often means reporting what could be considered Bad News.
When companies do adopt their dot-brands in a big way, they tend to do it rather quietly and almost always in a foreign language, so the news doesn’t usually cross my radar until long after it has ceased to be timely.
But it is true that the background noise of dot-brands is that quite a lot of them are being actively used to varying degrees, and I’m feeling some sense of obligation to report on that activity too, despite it being thoroughly un-newsworthy.
So here I present an unofficial list of the top 10 most-used dot-brands.
It’s based on how many active web sites I’ve found in each of the 460-odd dot-brand gTLDs I regularly spider.
I count a “dot-brand” as any gTLD that has Specification 13 in its ICANN contract, and here I’m defining an active web site to exclude redirects to sites in other, off-brand TLDs.
The numbers may not be precisely accurate today, because sites come and go, but I think they’re a decent guide.
I’m also fairly certain that “number of active web sites” is an absolutely terrible way to compare and rank dot-brands, but if nothing else I think the metric is a good indicator of enthusiasm for dot-brands (by the brand, if not necessarily its customers).
Here goes.
.seat — SEAT, S.A.
.lamborghini — Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A.
.bmw — Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft
.weber — Saint-Gobain Weber SA
.bnpparibas — BNP Paribas
Read the full post here
