The Domain Name Association put together a 75 slide power point presentation on the Internet usage habits of citizens in five countries. The countries included in the study were:
- U.S.A.
- U.K.
- Australia
- China
- India
The study looks at the habits of surfing, how people get to where they want to get online. The study also looks at the awareness of the new gtlds.
Let’s look at one example, participants were asked, “Where would you go to buy shoes ?” They were then given choices:
- Shoes.com
- Shoes.shop
- Shoes.country
- Shoes.buy
- Shoes.city
- Buy.Shoes
83.1 % of those in the U.S. chose Shoes.com, while 52 % of those in the U.K. picked shoes.country code, China users came in at 35 % for .com and then 21% for Buy.shoes.
Here is where it gets interesting, when the categories were tallied up from the first slide to just .Com, .Country Codes and New gTlds. The majority of Australians would have gone to a new tld to buy shoes. 50.8 % would have picked the new tld vs 42 % for their cctld and only 7.2 % would have chosen .com.
China was an even higher percentage, 58.2 % picked the new tld vs 35.3 % for .com. The U.K. was the only country where the cctld was the most popular choice, only 20.3 % of U.K. participants chose new tlds.
The next slides dealt with an Industry vertical, the question asked was, If you are setting up a website for your restaurant, which domain name would be most attractive to you?
JoesBostonRestaurant.com or all other tlds ? I think this is a weak question as there are many better options on any side of the aisle.
Only U.S. participants favored the .com with 64.4 % saying .com vs all other tlds. Australia was 98.4 in favor of all other tlds. The next slide breaks things down further, now you still have the choice of JoesBostonRestaurant.com but you can now distinguish between cctlds and new gtlds individually, in every country except the U.S. the new tlds won out over their cctld and .com.
We then get to making payments and the question was much like the others, Where would you go to make a payment online ?
onlinepayments.com or all other tlds, this was the first question where in the U.S. .Com lost 51.9 % for all other tlds and 48.1 % for .com. The other four countries were overwhelmingly all other tlds, no surprise there.
Here is another question, the answers are from all countries combined
If you were building a website, how attractive would each of the following extensions be to you for your website?
Rating 1-5; 5=Very Attractive
Mean Std. Dev.
BRAND
.youtube 3.29 1.16
.yellowpages 3.27 1.15
COMMUNITY
.eco\.healthcare 3.33 1.13
.charity 3.28 1.16
EXISTING
.com 3.66 1.10
.info 3.60 1.10
.us\.uk\.com.au\.in\.cn 3.46 1.10
GENERIC
.secure 3.60 1.12
.art 3.49 1.13
.coupon\.theater 3.41 1.19
.safety 3.33 1.12
.shop 3.31 1.11
.buy 3.30 1.14
.club\.online 3.25 1.14
.band 3.14 1.13
.family 3.12 1.15
.rsvp 2.96 1.18
.ninja 2.74 1.22
GEO
[.your city] 3.42 1.12
.us\.wales\.com.au\.in\.cn 3.39 1.16
.nyc\.london\.melbourne\.mumbai 3.30 1.10
INDUSTRY
.school 3.31 1.15
.realestate 3.22 1.19
.healthcare\.press 3.15 1.23
.build 3.10 1.14
.law 3.01 1.24
Internet Usage Preferences – How do you navigate to or get to web sites on the Internet?
Indicate which one method you use most often and which others you use sometimes or never.
“I do this most often” (%)
Type the domain name address directly into the browser
address bar (ex. domainname.com)
33
Type a company or relevant term into a search engine 41
Use a bookmark that I have set up 15
Click on a link from an email or other source 4
Use social media or a social service (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) 5
Use an “app” provided by that company
(ex. download an app from their bookstore or web page)
2
This was certainly an extensive study and a lot of work went into it. It is certainly worth reading and downloading to reference back as needed.
Here is the link
