Results of my own parking platform....uk is dead?

[disruptive]

I wanted to share the very simple, if depressing results of my own efforts to track traffic. So what've done is simply compare .com vs .xx.uk on average. The sad thing is that the .com domains which are often newer and have been left alone are generating more traffic. In fact over the average portfolio, not including current developed domains, I find that I get x2 traffic to .com domains compared with uk.

I'm really surprised that .com for some newwer reg's are beating x10 .co.uk domains that are 10 years older!

The sad thing is this coupled with the intuition is that there is no point in registering any uk domains at all.

Please prove me wrong that UK is not dead.

 

[martin-s]

No point in registering .uk domains at all is a bit harsh, just because they don't do very well on parking from type-ins!

 

[scottmccloud]

Is it not just a reflection of how people now use the internet? I hardly ever type a domain's URL.

 

[ian]

Couldn't it just be more a case that .com is searched more often, and that browsers/sites/tools often default to .com if an extension is missed. If .com is getting twice as much traffic than .co.uk, I think the .co.uk is doing pretty well.

 

[inbound]

Relying on type-in traffic as a main source of income? Yes, I'm not surprised that .uk domains don't fare well.

Building a site specifically for the UK on a UK domain... no reason at all why it should not fare as well (or better) than a .com that deals with a UK-only audience.

However, sadly for people here, domains are losing some of their importance. Look at Match (previously Match.com) who have re-branded due to pushing their app. There's little doubt that Match.com is still important to them but it shows that some business models are bypassing domains. Games use domains as secondary assets (support or peripheral marketing). Anything that is better as an app can get away without having decent domain (it might need a decent brand/name, but that doesn't mean they need the exact match - just like the ??????movie.com format for many movies, they can add something and no-one really cares).

 

[disruptive]

Its not that I won't keep my domains that are .uk, its just that the general thinking for me these days for sites that I'm building, I only go for a .com first and then .co.uk.

A like for like comparison is always hard but anecdotally it does seem that domains that were parked and got type ins and are .co.uk for example did better a long time ago. But these domains which are 10 years only (.co.uk) and abandoned to the vagaries of type-ins etc are not doing so well against < 1 year old .coms. Additionally I've found that even past developed domains (mainly .co.uk).

So the question is, with the price increase, I can see the limitations of buying a .co.uk but can see every reason to simply buy a .com as inbound suggestion and just suffix with xyz.