According to NetNames‘ Internet 2020 report, 92% of large companies in the US, Britain, France and Germany are planning to invest in new domain names (new gTLD’s) over the next three years, and 46% say they already have begun to invest in this area.
The telegraph.co.uk, wrote about the NetNanes’ report and chatted with CEO Gary McIlraith:
“Although .com will remain popular, registrations of new domain names will significantly overtake new registrations of .com and .net, as these established domains become saturated.
“Driven by the increase in internet adoption in emerging markets, a significant proportion of these new registrations will be made up of non-Latin characters, such as Cyrillic, Arabic and Chinese. Without the restrictions of keyboard entry, a .com extension could actually become a hindrance to attracting local traffic to a website.”
“The introduction of thousands of new domain name endings, ranging from .football to .shop and even .dog is set to dramatically change the way we search and navigate the web,” said of global domain name specialists NetNames.
“For a start, the descriptive nature of new domain name suffixes will help internet users to memorise web addresses more easily. As a result, our research shows that the vast majority of users will be more likely to enter a domain name in one of the new web suffixes into their browser bar, making them less reliant on search engines to find a website.”
McIlraith added that over one million domain names with new web suffixes have already been registered, and before long new registrations in the new suffixes will overtake those in .com.
“We are starting to see the emergence of communities of interest on the web with domain names that are much more relevant to those interests and the content of the websites they support”
“.Com and .Net domain names currently make up 42% of all web addresses according to Netnames and have been the main driver for the exponential growth of the internet in the last 20 years, but domain name specialists are predicting that .com could lose dominance by 2020, as hundreds of new web address endings come online.
As a result, .com, .net and country code top-level domains like .co.uk may well go out of fashion in favour of more descriptive, search-friendly and geographically-neutral web addresses.”