What About Dot Biz?

[FreddyS]

I am running in UK right now a campaign for dot biz, feedback so far not bad.
What are you thoughts here about dot biz?

 

[Shane]

I recently heard an advertisement on the radio for a website on a .biz. I literally laughed out loud.

 

[Nomzo]

My girlfriend's father advertises his small business through (8 characters) .biz, which then redirects to the main website on (21 character) .co.uk. He uses it for email also and in this situation the setup works perfectly fine. Ideal scenario would be to have all main extensions however it's not practical as an Australian company already had this idea and don't want to sell.

With no data to back this up, I'd say people in the UK are generally not put off by .net, .biz etc if the actual domain is understandable. On the other hand .nl, .fr, .de, .us, where people infer a language or region specific content, might create second thoughts in terms of relevancy. Of course it depends on what type of campaign you're running, what's being sold, selling to business customers etc.

 

[Ian]

.biz extension has more than 2.5m registered domains. It is a sizeable and popular TLD on some level.

 

[katherine]

Yes, but even .mobi has nearly 1 million regs (but shrinking).
.tel .pw have good hundreds of thousands of regs too, sometimes you wonder why you don't stumble on them more often. Probably not enough development going on to rank them in the serps.
I never visit .biz sites on a regular basis, but I visit CNO + ccTLDs extensively.

 

[Tia Wood]

I don't like it because it seems too easy to misspell (the radio test)

.biz
.biss
.bizz
.bis

 

[ImageAuthors]

.BIZ has various drawbacks for use in business.

Its primary selling point is that it's cheap and has wide SLD availability -- just like .PW and .XYZ and .OOO and .ENTERPRISES and .VENTURES and dozens or hundreds of other TLDs where successful websites will seldom be seen.

I like .BIZ better than those. But it does tend to look as cheap and be forgotten / misremembered.

Plus, it's an upgrade waiting to be paid for ... often at great future cost.

 

[FreddyS]

the replies here are more or less like what I expected, dot biz is picking up. this is as well the feedback from our campaign for hosting.co.uk where we give away a couple hundred free .biz domains. People really like it and start using it.

We targeted startups and people with ideas, just the space for presenting the idea was missing.
so we gave them the domain (.biz), the hosting, and some microsoft exchange accounts.

And out of the sudden they decided to build an online presence for their idea. I think it is a positive feedback when startups start using a niche TLD.
I called a few and asked them if they would decide the same if I had send them a voucher code for one of the new TLD´s, the answer was really surprising, they did not know about the newGTLDs and believe they would have been confused what todo.

At the end, what I learned from this campaign is that, to convince somebody to build an online presence and start using the domain it must be a trustworthy established TLD. We will see next year during the renew if I invested my money well and the clients stay.

I will check on monday if I have a few codes left, PM me if you want a .biz and let me pay for it. but you must build a little site.

 

[ImageAuthors]

Good luck with your campaign!

Not sure if it's true that .BIZ is picking up, however -- particularly not in terms of investment value, which is quite different from $5 registration volume. Certainly, giveaways are not evidence of .BIZ picking up.

 

[domainoid]

.biz domains do not do well at all on reseller market. as katherine says you do not see .biz websites often and i can't remember one i've been to recently.

 

[accelerator]

I am running in UK right now a campaign for dot biz, feedback so far not bad.
What are you thoughts here about dot biz?

I am not keen on them at all, mainly because they fail the "radio test", as someone has mentioned, the extension is hard to spell. I would not use one and don't register any. Sorry about that.

 

[Charles Sweeney]

I've never liked .biz Spammers were all over them from the start, plus the Z is spammy like "warez".

If you're doing .biz names, why just concentrate on the UK?

 

[LarryWentz]

Well I regret I didn't take .biz & .info more serious when they first launched. I should have tried to register a few names back then. With that said I have purchased .biz names from others & have sold one for a low 4 figure amount. If it's a strong generic name, I also have no problem using .biz to build a site.

 

[domainoid]

haven't seen many biz names sell for four figures not even generics so you lucked out with that one. websites having biz domain names may succeed but it is a weak extension. should not be your first choice when better extensions are unregistered or there is an available country code for your domain that makes sense.


agree a biz website can be associated with the owner not wanting to spend too much money on it which is very bad for business. also agree many spam emails come from biz addresses. should consider all factors before spending too much on your biz project.