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These 27 companies have ditched the .com for their dot-brand
Earlier today, I listed what I believe might be the top 10 dot-brand gTLDs with the most active web sites, but noted that it was probably a rubbish way to gauge the success of the dot-brand concept.
As a follow-up, I thought I’d figure out which brands have taken the bold step of ditching the .com and made their dot-brand their primary web destination.
I found 27 TLDs, which is simultaneously not a lot and easily twice as many as I was expecting.
The most-popular second-level string was “home”, with 12 examples. The string “global” occurs five times on the list.
I did this research manually with Google and a list of 275 dot-brands — anything with Spec 13 in its contract and more than two domains in its zone file — culled from my database.
To get on this list, at least one of the following had to be true:
- The dot-brand was the top hit on Google when searching for the brand in question.
- The .com redirects to the dot-brand.
Sometimes I had to factor out Google’s enormously irritating habit of localizing results, which would prioritize a .uk domain, particularly in the case of automotive brands.
On a few occasions, if I could not be certain whether the “official” primary site was in a ccTLD or the dot-brand, I used the brand’s Wikipedia page as a tie-breaker.
Some entries on the list may be a bit debatable.
I’m not sure whether .barclays should be there, for example. There’s little doubt in my mind that barclays.co.uk is the site that the majority of Barclays’ banking customers use, but barclays.com redirects visitors to home.barclays, so it fits my criteria.
In general, I’ve erred on the side of caution. If the top search result was for the brand’s .com, it was immediately ruled out, no matter how enthusiastic a dot-brand user the company otherwise appeared to be.
Here’s the list. Please let me know if you think I’ve missed any.
[table id=57 /]
Twenty-seven gTLDs is not a great many, of course, considering that some dot-brands have been delegated for half a decade already.
It’s about half as many as have already torn up their ICANN registry agreements, and it represents less than 6% of the new gTLDs that my database says have Spec 13 in their contracts.
But I reiterate that this is not a list of companies using their dot-brands but rather of those apparently putting their .com firmly in the back seat to their dot-brand.
I’m not sure I totally agree. The first one I checked I typed in
https://www.toyota.com/
It works. It is not redirecting me to global.toyota
So did they ditch their .com?
I also typed in Pioneer.com and land at http://www.pioneer.com/landing – again I don’t think they have ditched .com. Note I did not check every link posted above.
Yes, you did say “Some entries on the list may be a bit debatable”…
But interesting to see a complied list anyway.
toyota-global.com, which is listed as their global site, is the one that redirects. For me, the .toyota site ranks higher in Google than the .com.
The Pioneer on pioneer.com is a different company.
good point on pioneer. however, they then can not be classified as having moved away from the .com. At least not from the primary web address.
For me, toyota.com comes up first. so it is hard to quantify what is the primary site. but it does not look as if they gave up the .com
The 3 brands that may be the most familiar to many people in the UK, on the surface at least, don’t really seem to use the new gTLD as their primary customer facing site.
Canon seems to use .canon as a company business information site. Product information in the UK seems to be at http://www.canon.co.uk
Pioneer seems to be similar but also has a map to direct people to the local/regional sites for products and support which is http://www.pioneer.eu here
Toyota seems to use http://www.toyota.co.uk for their official website and use global.toyota as a corporate information / news room.
global.canon is branded as Canon Global
As I said, I ignored localization in the search results.
Is it really about localisation? Or is it more about serving people with very different intentions totally different information to meet each of their specific needs i.e. corporate news v product?
Global.canon
Vision, Our Business, Newsroom, Sustainability, About Canon
seems very different from the regional variants like
canon.co.uk
Products, Services & Apps, Get Inspired, Support, Official Store
&
http://www.usa.canon.com
Explore, Products Learn, Support, About, Shop
Many companies do the same with different 2nd level domains, e.g.
Overstock uses o.info for information and overstock.com for selling product.
Most people would never have even heard of most of these companies and even then many in the list seem to be “in doubt”. .Brand has been the biggest disaster of the new tld program.
What happened to all the talk of .apple, .google, .microsoft?
Here here, the biggest damp squid ever. remember the big announcement from fox entertainment dotFox coming soon, even gave a date April 2015 with a flashy page. nothing nilch because they realised just from their own employees confusion it was a no goer.
Q: What happened to all the talk of .apple, .google, .microsoft?
A: https://domainnamewire.com/2019/05/09/apple-registers-apple-pay-domains-under-apple/
ai.google, about.google, design.google, grow.google, blog.google, domains.google, wellbeing.google – and more
Microsoft has over 170 .brand domain registrations – most used as redirects for now: office.microsoft, surface.microsoft, support.microsoft, etc.
These companies are on their own timeline for using THEIR .brand domains. They also have the right to choose how they use them. They might not appease you, but you don’t work for any of these companies.
.Brand has never been anything disastrous. Please desist from exaggerating.
* Note: My above comment is for replying Snoopy.
Interesting that HOME was the most popular second level choice, especially given all the noise about not delegating .home at all because of previous idiots using it as a default TLD.
Not sure these choices effect a delegation of .home yet, but I would hope ICANN would revisit delegating .home in a few years.
For .berlin we decided that for a full switch visible public advertising is a key factor and the ranking at Alexa too.
For toyota.com the rank is 4,510 and for global.toyota only 151,239.