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Consumers’ perception of .com versus other suffixes
A survey from the Lexicon-Branding company shows consumers see little difference between the almighty “.com” domain names and those ending with “.net” or “.biz”.
Most companies still go to great lengths to protect their “.com” domain name and even acquire complementary “.com” monikers. It’s well known to domainers that having a “.com” will generally mean a higher selling price.
Could this new and somewhat surprising survey curb interest for the .com names?
Probably not.
As long as market leaders continue to invest in their .com names as being their “main brands”, well continue to see the market for .com names soar.
Let’s take a closer look at the survey’s results. 2,509 regular internet users who had purchased products and services online during the last 6 months of 2005. Respondents were asked to rank 4 test web sites, for which the only difference was the suffix, by answering 6 questions on a 10 point scale. As such, respondents were shown the exact same site with the only difference being the .com or .biz domain name ending.
Looking at the survey results, it’s obvious consumers seem to perceive virtually no difference between .com and .net while .biz only slightly lagging behind.
Generally, 41.2% of respondents have a very positive opinion of the .com, compared to 27.2% for .net and 10.7% for .biz. Inversely, 15.9% reported perceiving .biz as very negative, compared to a mere 3.8% for .net and 1.1% for .com.
When asked about their impression with doing business with a bank, 12.3% reported a positive impression of a bank with a .com domain name, compared to 11.2% for a .net and 11.1% for a .biz domain name suffix.
In the case of an electronics store, the percentage of respondents with a positive impression were 28.7% for .com, 27.8% for .net and 24.7% for .biz, which shows respondents don’t discriminate much on the domain suffix, in this context.
The .biz is many years younger than the .net and suffers certain liabilities such as the fact that the domain name suffis is the less familiar of the 3 and some respondents went to say they think .biz sounds “cheap and slang-like”. Over time, these perceptions should be overcomed but it remains to be seen how long it’ll take.
Here’s what Lexicon-Branding’s CEO David Placek had to say, for the final word: “Our overall conclusion is that a business would do well to create the most effective name it can and secure it no matter what the domain suffix. In terms of actual consumer acceptance and usage, it doesn’t make much difference”.
For all PayPal merchants who need affiliates
Millions of web merchants have already used PayPal to exchange money online both safely and painlessly.
Now, these PayPal merchants want more sales and ebay alone can’t cover the whole web, especially in local communities. Also, online merchants want to tap into their close business relationship networks to grow their sales. Affiliate marketing is very effective but until now, it’s been somewhat of a drag to fully implement it with PayPal, not to mention the monthly clerical work like actually sending the payments to the affiliates.
In comes PayDotCom, an affordable service that does what it says. It helps merchants setup and manage an affiliate network, based on the PayPal transaction engine.
It couldn’t be easier. You sell a product using a PayPal buy button, then you register that exact product in your account at PayDotCom and share the associated affiliate code with all your online friends who will gleefully spread the word about your product, knowing they’ll be commissioned on every sale, directly in their PayPal account.
Wow, now that’s 21st century e-marketing!
It’s free to signup as an affiliate and make lots of money with every new friend who signs up under you, not to mention the generous commissions you’ll make on every offering you help sell, from their lists.
It’s worth giving it a free try, at the very least.
KnowledgeView launches a hosted publishing service
An online news editing and publishing service designed for regional and local newspapers, Internet and newsletter publishers — at just a fraction of the cost of similar services — is being launched tomorrow (Wednesday).
RAPIDPublish.info already has its first customer, the North West Enquirer, a weekly newspaper based in Manchester.
With RAPIDPublish.info, the user can access and file news items and pictures from selected agencies and set up filters to receive up-to-the-minute reports of breaking news and running stories. The items can be opened and edited on-screen, and then forwarded to colleagues or sent directly to page make-up or to a web page online.
The service is available from just GBP32 (46 euros) a month, making it an ideal and affordable system for smaller publishing groups and newsletter producers.
RAPIDPublish.info has been designed by KnowledgeView Ltd, of London, using its hugely successful RAPID Browser software and integrating Adobe’s latest publishing software, including InCopy and InDesign. KnowledgeView has also signed up with content providers such as PR Newswire, GNN Government News Network and CCN Matthews to provide news to subscribers immediately at no cost. Users can also subscribe to Dow Jones Newswire and Independent News and Media services. Industry RSS news feeds are also available.
Publishers can sign up to the service online at www.rapidpublish.info and begin to use it immediately using any web browser.
Roberto Minio, Technical Director at KnowledgeView, said: “For editorial efficiency, the RAPIDPublish.info platform is based on a modern concept of newsdesks for multi-channel publishing, so that journalists can easily publish to paper, web or other devices.
“KnowledgeView’s and Adobe’s support for XML tagging makes it easy for journalists to publish a developing story on several platforms. This approach, while helping to increase circulation and advertising revenues, also allows the modern publisher to have a firmer handle on the use of his own content on-line, an issue raised recently by the World Association of Newspapers’ complaint on the ‘unauthorised use’ of its content by web harvesters.”
The North West Enquirer, RAPIDPublish.info’s first customer, is a new weekly newspaper launching in May with a target circulation of 20,000. It will cover Cumbria, Lancashire, Cheshire, Merseyside and Greater Manchester.
Bob Waterhouse, the editor, said the choice of service was made after several systems were tested. RAPIDPublish.info was selected because of its powerful news content management, flexible editorial workflow, multi-publishing capabilities and low cost of ownership.
Copyright (C) 2006 PR Newswire Europe
Windows Live Search Beta
Microsoft is vying for the top spot in the search engine wars and experts have mixed feelings about the Windows Live Search Beta offering. Some say it’s the most credible attempt at challenging Google but others say it just isn’t enough. One thing is sure, it’s here to stay!
First off, the service senses your browser’s favorite language but doesn’t appropriately check for the exact geographic location (using the IP address). A selection of the latest news is presented under the traditional search field, in this case, the “Windows Live Search” field, to be precise.
Very quickly, the user figures he has to connect to see any advanced features. Once connected through the usual Passport service, it’s possible to change quite a few default preferences.
Over and above the news and search preferences, the user can try the new Windows Live Mail Beta where 2 Go of space is freely allowed to members who can enjoy Outlook-like features wherever they may roam.
Don’t cancel your hot Saturday night date to play with Windows Live Search Beta, it’s still in its infancy. The interface is probably deliberately scarce but it lacks depth in many ways. Microsoft is surely keeping a few surprises for later on.
Regarding the search engine itself, the results seem pretty sanitized and therefore, a little too boring. Navigating the results is downright innovative as far as technology is concerned but it’s not easy to have “the big picture”. There seems to be a bug in the sponsored results since there’s no scrolling feature. The flux feature which seems aimed at getting the latest news from blogs also appears not to be working, in most cases.
So this is it.
Microsoft is finally migrating its MSN brand to the Live branding. Don’t be surprised if you see the Redmond giant pull it’s search engine and Hotmail out of the portal and into the Live.com destination. It’s the new thing. From personalized home pages to web-based versions of their Office software, Live is now the center of Microsoft’s online experience.
The upside for Microsoft and it’s users is that this platform, as a digital foundation, has more potential than the previous model, mainly because it’s so tightly integrated. As such, good things might come of this effort but it’s not likely Google’s empire will be under any serious stress soon, because of it.
Higher returns on PPC investments with AxROI
More and more, online advertising campaigns are being tracked so further actions may be more efficiently driven.
Online advertisers need to look for the right media catering to the targeted customers who are the most likely to buy the offering. It’s easier said than done but using the AxROI software from Axandra might help make sense of the metrics being acquired.
When you purchase the AxROI software to install on your MS-Windows PC, you’re able to setup, monitor and analyse as many campaigns as your wish. In a nutshell, here’s what this software helps you achieve:
- Increase the profits of existing advertising campaigns;
- Save money by identifying and terminating campaigns that only cost money;
- Optimize the return on investment (ROI) of all your Internet marketing campaigns;
- Find the organic search engine listings that work best for you.
It works fine with both Google AdWords and Yahoo!’s Overture pay-per-click services but that’s not all, you can track any all other pay per click service, banner campaigns, newsletter ads, text link ads and all other types of online ads. Furthermore, it can watch over your organic search engine listings as well as your paid inclusion links.
In short, you’ll be in charge of what’s going on with all the places you’ve advertised. You’ll have easy to understand metrics about who delivers and who doesn’t. This makes it much easier to make decisions, especially if you need to report to a board, for instance.
Current customers use AxROI to lower their costs by eliminating ineffective campaigns or reinvesting their savings in successful campaigns. The software is both easy to master, flexible and very affordable considering the number of high-end features delivered.
Trademarked keyword ads are now banned at Yahoo!
As if there weren’t enough limiting laws in our modern societies, trademarks are the new bane of the online world.
Most lawyers won’t say but the trademark protection craze has reached new heights. Some law firms are known to enforce trademarks with little or no restraint, let alone judgement, causing the general public to feel very uneasy at refering to trademarks, for justified fear of being sued for often grossly disproportionate damages.
It appears Yahoo! is joining the ever growing group of companies who steer clear from trademarks altogether for fear of vicious litigation. More to the point, Yahoo! has banned all bids on trademarked keywords and trademarked terms in a sweeping effort to fend off future legal fights.
The trademarked keyword ads ban is deemed to have started March 1st, 2006. As such, Yahoo! Search Marketing has already issued notifications regarding the new “editorial guidelines” every advertiser needs to follow.
Will other search engine choose to go down the “less likely to be litigated path” too? What about comparison shopping web sites? That’s not to mention the bustling domain name landing pages business.
In your opinion, is this the beginning of the “age of online paranoia” or the end of “reasonnable trademark use”? Either way, this Yahoo! decision, in many ways, spells the overwhelming victory of lawyers over common sense.
The conversion rate of major search engines’ advertising
When it comes to key e-commerce metrics, who do you think offers the most bang for your buck?
It’s usually a matter of trying each major search engine for yourself and analyzing the click ratios but this one time Websidestory, an analytics company, has done it for us and their work shows that ads on AOL and MSN appear to be far more effective those on Google and Yahoo! at driving sales.
For the number crunchers, here’s a view of the median order conversion rate (MOCR) by these major search engine at B2C e-commerce web sites, for the month of January 2006 (for all categories):
- AOL 6.17%
- MSN 6.03%
- Yahoo! 4.07%
- Google 3.83%
Anything over 5% means very nice conversion ratios so the fact AOL and MSN actually go over 6% says a lot about the quality of their intended audience, from an advertiser’s perspective.
Some experts see a major draw for visitors in “shopping mode” in the AOL and MSN rich portals as opposed to a higer percentage of selective web surfers (non-shoppers) in the Google-like engines. Some may consider this type of observation as overly simplified, considering the complex interactions going on when a user searches content online.
It’s important to note the results for this study includes traffic from both organic and paid keywords.
All in all, these major search engines shouldn’t be scared to lose their ad revenues because the median average for all search engines, was a mere 1.97%, for the month of January 2006.
If you want more details about this study, Mr Stephen Baker from BusinessWeek has published a comprehensive review you may want to read.
Where will you spend your precious online ad budget next?
Built2Go offers turnkey websites
If you’re looking to turn your domain name into an exciting destination for your visitors, you need to setup a nicely designed web site that serves a clear purpose.
As you may have learned over the past few years, even if your web site looks nice, visitors won’t come back unless it’s useful. With the abundance of available web sites, yours has to offer something that connects with your visitors’ needs. Buying templated web site packages is the fast way to get there.
The creative people at Big Resources Inc. appear to understand this very well and as such, they have launched an innovative template web site called Built2Go that really helps domain owners monetize their cyber-properties because each template comes with the necessary PHP code (usually known as “the harder part”).
This comes as a breath of fresh air to the webmasters out there who had to manually code everything behind templates that had no PHP code to support them. The PHP code in the Built2Go templates basically bring them to life, instantly.
It’s a different concept and domain owners are sure to like it!
Reading the news using the new .mobi domain extension preview
It appears Google has discreetly gone active with its fashionably hip web solution using the new .mobi TLD set aside exclusively for mobile devices, content and web sites configured for delivery to such devices.
Does this mean a new .mobi “land grab” race is sketching up on the not-so-distant horizon? Maybe but it seems the .mobi extension is reserved for specific uses.
Even though Google are something of early adopters for testing out the .mobi domain moniker, it’s time to prepare yourself too since the extension is set for commercial availability for summer 2006.
People who wish to see what news on a mobile device would happen to look like can take a peek at this address which lets you navigate the current new feeds. Of course, it’s a lot more fun to look at this using a web-enabled cell phone or mobile device!
The Annual Legislative Sessions in China spark domain activity
While China’s two annual legislative and advisory sessions proceed in full swing this week there seems to be a race to register internet domain names relating to the meetings, the Beijing News reported Wednesday
Domain names, such as “11-5.com.cn”, referring to the country’s new 11the five-year development program, and “lianghui.cn” relate to the ongoing annual sessions of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the paper said.
Lianghui literally means ‘the two meetings’ and how the people in China refer the concurrently held assemblies.
The domain name “11-5.com.cn” could fetch as much 5 million yuan (about 620,000 U.S. dollars) if the registered owner were to sell it, said the report.
Flashy, easy-to-remember internet names that bring bring high clicks rates have a lot of business potential. Those who register such domain names make their money by selling them to others, industry insiders said.
The registration of domain names using the terms related to the annual legislative and advisory sessions is legal as there are no regulations which ban such registration, according to the newspaper’s sources.
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