Cars.com.au

07-30-2002, 08:29 AM

The thing is in australia virtually all major companies with perhaps only a few exceptions use and promote on their .com.au. Maybe a handful of large co's promote .com's, and the only others local co's who promote .com addresses seem to be the ones who don't want to pay the higher rates for a .com.au.

As far as speculation goes the whole thing is so tightly regulated that domain speculation in .com.au is rare in comparision to many cc tlds.

The current auctions going on are so tightly screened that its almost immpossible to even get the chance to bid unless you have a company/business which is very close to the domain your after. The current auctions are to sell off names as in the past generic names covering who industries or geographic areas generally weren't allowed to be registered.

So most of the buyers would be largely corporates or small business owners rather than people hoping to resell .com.au, in fact selling the domains themselves is prohibited.

07-30-2002, 08:33 AM

Originally posted by MattyP

The thing about these .com.au names is they have no re-sale value to my understanding. In other words you may not re-sell a .com.au name.

Matt

basically yeah they aren't allowed to be resold, the only way to sell one off would to transfer the underlying business registration or company I think.

**bidawinner** · 07-30-2002, 08:51 AM

I have never understood .com.au it is nothing more than a SUB DOMAIN of .au..why isnt /wasnt .au the formal extension?

I have never really looked into it...just dosent seem right..

The bottom line though is .com.au has become the defacto australian extension and thats their main value..it's actually used .
And as so, I am assuming that something like cars.com.au actually gets type-in traffic ..i see .net.au is also used
http://www.abc.net.au/

Give me Identity seems to be the theme

BID

**AMERICAR** · 07-30-2002, 09:26 AM

I dunno what it finished at, the only way you can buy a .com.au is to buy the Company.

Nobody can just buy the domain name .. not yet anyway.

07-30-2002, 05:34 PM

So what is the extra cost to create an empty shell (do.nuffin.com) company in Australia huh?

**Anion** · 07-30-2002, 06:01 PM

I wonder who's stupid enough to buy these names?

**fizz** · 07-30-2002, 06:16 PM

Um, firms in Australia that are in these fields. As snoopy pointed out, .com.au is the most widely-used TLD for businesses in Australia.

Not everyone lives in .com land

MattyP · 07-30-2002, 08:43 PM

Anion said
I wonder who's stupid enough to buy these names?

As a buyer or re-seller of domain names would you pass up names with overture returns such as

NineMsn.com.au 1,592 Ninemsn 13,268
AFL.com.au 4,007
ABC.com.au 2,040
Yahoo.com.au 12,499

I think not.

Australians are becoming increasingly aware of .com.au for a few reasons. One of those reasons is the frustration of typing in a name like Flowers.com and finding it to be an American site that services Americans only.

So Australians are learning that if they are looking for a specific product I.E. flowers or flower delivery, Flowers.com.au is where they will find a site that can actually service them.

Another reason is many of Australia's large companies missed out on the .com release. They were then forced to use .com.au names and through advertising of these sites Australians are becoming very aware of .com.au.

Now that generic .com.au names are finally being released it will not take long for .com.au to be entrenched, if not the leading extension of choice, a close second to .com

Matt

07-31-2002, 02:42 AM

actually I think if you asked most australian firms what their preferred domain would be out of .com and .com.au, most would likely say 'were australian so .com.au'. From what I can see its the default standard over here, with the number promoting .com's being fairly low, Telstra and the ANZ Bank are the two big exceptions to that which spring to mind but the number of exceptions are small.

Other than that it seems to be mainly individuals and very small co's over here who use .com and I think that's because getting a .com is about 1/10th the cost of getting the same .com.au. .com is perceived very much as an american extension by most over here I think you would find, and I would say consumers would expect a business to have a .com.au ext.

I think the thing is unless you lived in australia; .com.au would just sound like another rubbishy extension like all the others, but the difference is it is actually used by business rather than most of the names being owned by speculators. Its always been the standard and there doesn't seem to be much evidence of that changing, unlike some other countries where there seems to a be a trend towards .com from what I understand of it.

**AMERICAR** · 07-31-2002, 09:05 PM

Nicely put Snoopy, and a lotta effort by Mattyp as well.

07-31-2002, 09:26 PM

Nicely summarized, Americar.

MattyP · 08-01-2002, 01:20 AM

Here is an interesting example of of the .com Vs .com.au in Australia.

As Snoopy mentioned Telstra uses the extension .com. ( Telstra is Australias' largest phone carrier) My phone bill arrived today and in the middle of the envelope it had visit: ' Visit www.Telstra.com I'ts your dot com'

Now Telstra's advertising would arrive in 9/10 Australian homes.

When I did a check of overture searches Telstra.com had 3,934 searches last month and Telstra.com.au had 3,187.

I suppose that those figures reveal, even after Telstra advertising the .com extension, Australians are becoming more and more accustomed to typing in .com.au.

Matt

08-01-2002, 01:35 AM

very interesting matty, I just tried the other one anz, who promote anz.com here

anz.com 5880
anz.com.au 4210

just shows that no matter how much is spent promoting a .com here a very big % of customers will still look for the .com.au anyway.

MattyP · 08-01-2002, 01:47 AM

I would be interested to know if people of other countries around the world have found the same with their local countries tlds.

Matt

**MarkyMark** · 08-05-2002, 05:27 PM

here in sweden .se is outstandingly number one. Even .nu is bigger than .com (nu means now in swedish). Thing is its possible to start a company for like $500 and reg a .se. We have on large player speculating in them (not me), reselling them for $5000 a pop.

**fizz** · 08-05-2002, 05:40 PM

Very interesting observations MarkyMark. When people in Sweden see a domain name with .com how do they perceive the company - do they immediately think it's from North America? Also, how is .info viewed in Sweden?

MattyP · 08-05-2002, 05:45 PM

Two countries don't make it official but it seems local ext's may be having an impact on the sales of .com names.

The currency exchange rate I believe has hurt people of many countries dealing in $US.

Matt

**MarkyMark** · 08-05-2002, 06:17 PM

.info is unheard of except in the internet specialist field (0.5% of the population knows it exists is a wild guess).

The cheapest domains is still by far .comnetorg and .com is not exclusively seen as north american. A lot of local companies use it here (our family company www.ridtur.com for example).

.com has the internet ring to it and is tried by everybody if nothing is found on .se or .nu when searching for a company/site.