Earlier this year ICANN commissioned a study to see how aware consumers are of domain name extensions, both “legacy” ones like .com and .org and the new ones such as .tech, .online etc.,. The results make for interesting reading:
- More than half of respondents (52 percent) were aware of at least one new gTLD.
- Awareness has particularly increased in North America (29 percent in 2015 vs. 38 percent in 2016), Asia Pacific (53 percent vs. 58 percent) and Europe (33 percent vs. 45 percent).
- Reported visits to new gTLDs decreased (65 percent vs. 50 percent).
When talking about “legacy” domains:
- Of a subset of legacy TLDs, consumers were most aware of .COM (95 percent), .NET (88 percent) and .ORG (83 percent).
- These TLDs rated highly (91 percent) as trustworthy destinations on the Internet.
- ccTLDs are considered trustworthy by most consumers (95 percent) in regions where they are commonly used.
The guys over at Radix put together a graphic to illustrate some of the report’s findings, though obviously they’re focussing on their own domain extensions. Regardless it’s still interesting to see how aware people are of the new options for domains.
Have you seen many new domains online? Let us know in the comments.