It is again surprising to me that the general replies on this thread are 'against' .st's having any value. I read the comments of all, with the exception of WhoDatDog, oh sorry I meant Sonny there, with immense interest.
I look on domaining from an advertising/marketing viewpoint, not as a domainer, and thus I look to see what domains have potential for exploitation to enhance a company/business exposure in the market place. If you have ten companies all producing widgets for example, a worldwide business, then only one of them can be fortunate enough to own widget.com, after this you then have widget.net/.org/.info/.biz. Even if each of these gTLD's were all owned by different companys then you still have at least five companies without a total singular word domain name!
Use of widget.us/widget.de/widget.co.uk/etc. gives a geographical restriction to the marketing of the company concerned caused by the use of the ccTLD suffix. This is where cleaver advertising/marketing of the whole domain name including suffix comes into its own. The 'st' suffix can be used for the abbreviation of many words including 'Street', 'State', and 'Site', and there is nothing wrong with utilizing this commodity of the suffix, indeed it would seem daft not too.
The final line of 'SDSinc's' post above says:
"BTW when I see 'st' I think 'street' before 'state' but it's just me.'
This order of recognition, Street before State, is how most Americans would see the domain unless the domain was and is a State name. Here it is also interesting to note the wording clearly, the use of the word 'before' also shows an acceptance, even if subconscious, of 'St' as an acceptable abbreviation for State! It is this that brings value to such domain suffixes in advertising/marketing terms.
We have all read about the influx of advertising dollars into advertising on the internet and away from traditional advertising media. It does seem though, to me at least, that few domainers see that we are soon approaching the advent of advertising agencies/brokers buying up domain names to utilize as a vehicle of advertising to the public. Advertising agencies/brokers would rather own a site than pay 'rental' for a site, for if they own it they can not only place their own adverts on the site but also restrict access to the site for others. This is the future, based purely on advertising/marketing psychology and economics.
I will continue to take the flak, that does not worry me, but please think ahead, as domainers surely that is what we are meant to do, we register a domain in the hope of having a product that, for whatever reason, is usable by an end-user. Here remember that many domain names, including a heck of a lot of dotcoms, are actually worthless without development, but they still have a value as purely a domain capable of development!
