Sedo.com published a New gTLD Research Report last month and I don’t see that anyone reported on it.
The report was based on a survey of 600 small to medium business owners that took place in January
The most important findings of the ‘gTLD Awareness Report’ are:
- 63% of small to mid-sized business owners are unaware that new gTLDs will be available in 2013 and many do not understand what the value of these new addresses will be.
- Over half of respondents feel that new gTLDs will make the internet more confusing.
- More than 40% of respondents said there was no advantage or were unsure what the advantage of a new gTLD would be.
- 94% of respondents said they were not currently planning to purchase a new gTLD.
We have reported about other similar surveys.
Generally we have the same criticism of this survey as the others, which is that more than half of those questioned never purchased a domain:
“63.7% of respondents have purchased domain names in the past”Why ask someone who has never purchased a domain about new domains?
So if 63% never purchase a domain it could be the same 63% that never heard of new gTLD’s
While many look at these numbers as a negative, we don’t
We don’t find it shocking or surprising that more than half of the respondents haven’t heard of the new gTLD program.
Why should they?
Not one has launched and the whole process seems to an outside (and some insiders) to be a bureaucratic mess which has been going on for years.
Of course none of the new gTLD’s registries have began to advertise, and ICANN hasn’t seemed to have spent a dime in marketing the program in mainstream media or to the type of business owners the survey covered.
The fact that 36% of respondants have even heard of new gTLD’s is we think pretty remarkable for a product that hasn’t even launched.
If 63% haven’t heard of a product its not surprising that only 6 % of the people plan on purchasing one.
On the other hand enom.com announced that they received over 2 Million expressions of interest to register a new gTLD and UnitedDomains.com has over 1.1 million pre-registrations.
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