dot-US domain Extension – A sleeping Giant?

There’s always a great deal of discussion going on about various TLDs such as .com/.net/.org/.info/.mobi/.de/.ca etc. We all know that dot-com the undisputed King is ruling the domain Kingdom ever since internet came in to existence. Along with dot-com, we saw the early adoption of .net and .org TLDs.

Then came other ccTLDs and some of them are quite popular in their native countries such as .de/.fr/.co.uk/.ca etc. It is obvious these TLDs keep getting stronger all the time due to their mass adoption by proud people of these countries. If you look at the success of most of the ccTLDs, you will see an obvious relationship between the TLD and how proud people feel about their county, culture, and language.

That begs the question: Why .us TLD has not been mass adopted by American people?

We all know that Americans are very proud of America. They love their language, culture, and country.

It appears the reasons for slow adoption of .us TLD are perhaps the following:

- Most American businesses registered .com domains early on. They didn’t have to go with anything else as Americans own the most .com domains registered, and perhaps the most developed .com sites.

- Established .com businesses didn’t feel much need to have multiple sites including .us sites for the same businesses.

- People from other countries perhaps didn’t find good available .com domains, and perhaps made them settle for their country-codes as the second best choice. But Americans didn’t have to do that as they own millions of good .com names anyway.

Due to all the above, there were a lot of good .us domains available either to register or purchase in the secondary market just a couple of years ago.

I know many people moved in to .us TLD and grabbed nice domains. I followed crowd and acquired few myself and then waited for the buyers to come while I was working on developing some of my other domains.

Something changed all of a sudden late last year when I received quite a few inquiries about our geo-targeted .us domains. I thought it was all unreal and kind of wondered if something suddenly changed.

Earlier this year, we sold double-digit number of .us domains each in the four figure range. Again all domains were geo-targeted ones such as a Stae/City/County+Service.us type. We keep getting more inquiries about .us domains and it appears something is changing in the American Domaining Landscape. It may be that:

- Americans are finally realizing that they still have great opportunities available for low investment in .us ccTLD.

- 300 million USA population has run out of the available supply of good .com domains at reasonable prices and hence getting their own country domain .us

- America has the highest number of business start-ups every year and they need lots of domains

- World’s biggest economy needs more domains to continue the growth

- Or perhaps it’s all the above plus mix it with the American pride ……. and you have a winning recipe

It won’t be surprising to see .us popularity and prices climb up the ladder as we move forward.

You can still find some great bargain in this sleeping giant. Get some if you can.

I would like to hear your .us experiences and success stories.