ccTLDs.com » Country Code Specific Forums » .uk Forum

[Asmro]

In comparison, does anyone know how .co.uk compares in popularity in the UK VS the .com extension? I know it seems to be popular with a lot of big businesses in the UK, but wasn't sure.

[Rick Latona]

I hope they like .uk better. I've been buying the crap out of them.

[alpha]

Originally Posted by Asmro

In comparison, does anyone know how .co.uk compares in popularity in the UK VS the .com extension? I know it seems to be popular with a lot of big businesses in the UK, but wasn't sure.

I live in the UK, so I can speak from experience.

Before I got into domaining (aka regular dumb surfer), when I surfed online looking to buy an item, I would avoid the Google results showing a .com website. why? because it was pot luck whether the site you clicked on was based in the U.S. Whereas conversely I knew for sure that a .co.uk was going to be a store located in the UK - that's the downside in sharing the same language as the U.S

The general rule of thumb is that multinational companies headquartered in the UK typically use .com

National companies almost always use .co.uk

You may have seen this report before, but there's some good graphs and stats in it that relate to all cctld's: http://www.nominet.org.uk/digitalAss...report2008.pdf

this comment particularly relevant to this forum:

It is interesting to note that .com has the smallest proportion of its registrants based in Europe of all the gTLDs, with 21%. The gTLD with the largest proportion of its registrants based in Europe is .info, with 37% and .biz follows closely behind with 31%. This suggests that European businesses are more open to a range of different TLDs, whilst non-European are most keen on .com, to the detriment of the other gTLDs.

page 11 gives you a breakdown of cctld vs com/net etc by country

[Edwin]

"Research carried out earlier this year illustrates that British Internet users are six times more likely to choose a .uk rather than .com address when looking for information via an Internet search engine... The online survey also found that 62% believe a .uk address suggests a company is local or more relevant than a .com, and a third believe that it is important for international companies to have local domain names in order to attract local customers."

This was from a survey YouGov conducted in November 2007. I have no reason to believe that anything has changed since then.

[Asmro]

Rick - LOL - you better hope so

Thanks for that little survey and your opinion Edwin and Alpha.

It would be interesting to try reaching out to a whole different community of internet surfers, such as people from the uk. Maybe that'll be my next investment