This post is obviously off the topic of work, but my cousin is very close to giving birth to triplets, and she is blogging from her hospital room! That’s right, she is scheduled to give birth on Wednesday, was admitted into the hospital last night, and she and her husband have been able to post about the pending-birth from their room. Their blog has really been cool for our family, which is spread all over the U.S. and is obviously very interested in how everything is going.

Count this as just one more way that the Internet has completely changed how people are living their lives.

I just published an article for The Industry Standard - The allure of the .com domain name. The article deals with the reasons that the .com top-level domain has become by far the most popular in the world.

To see just how big a lead .com has over its closest competitors, check out this chart. The chart shows the top 6 TLDs and the percentages when compared against each other, not the percetages when compared against the total of all TLDs. (The data comes from here.)

As part of the research for this article, I posted a question to the Targeted Traffic Forum, which I am lucky enough to be a part of. This site, which was founded by Rick Schwartz, has the best domain-related conversations of any that I have ever seen on the Web, and the people who hang out in this forum have really great insight into the domain name industry.

The question I posted was this:

I am working on an article about how the .com extension has maintained the highest value and allure compared to other top-level domains. I’m curious if anyone has interesting thoughts or theories as to why .com is so much more valuable.

I got some really great responses, and I wanted to include some of them here.

Joe Alagna, CentralNic:

95% of the largest brands in the world and their sub-brands advertise .COM domains every day on TV, Billboards, Radio, in Print, and Online. Here are the top 10…

Company | 2007 Ad Spend

proctorandgamble.COM (et. al.) | $3.4 Billion
att.COM | $2.3 Billion
verizon.COM | $2.1 Billion
generalmotors.COM (et. al.) | $2.1 Billion
timewarner.COM | $1.7 Billion
fordmotors.COM (et. al.) | $1.6 Billion
waltdisney.COM (et. al.) | $1.3 Billion
johnsonandjohnson.COM (et. al.) | $1.3 Billion
sprint.COM | $1.3 Billion
newscorp.COM (et. al.) | $1.3 Billion

Total for just the top ten advertisers in the US | $18.6 Billion

There are 18.6 billion reasons that .COM is the most recognized Tld on the planet (benefiting all .COM owners in the world) and this doesn’t include the long tail which is a larger piece.

The biggest advertisers in the world advertise .COM domains. Dot.COM is burned into our collective consciousness every hour of every day. It’s as simple as that.

Mark Teaster:

I’ve seen the arguement go around many times - and the explanation that seems to fit best to me was always the “implied” restrictions on .net (As Networks etc ..) and on .org (Non-profit and various Organizations).

Derek, Aardwolf MUD:

Somewhat philosophical, but this is similar to how language itself develops. The words we use for most things are arbitrary, if a “rose” had been called an “esor” then, by convention, it becomes a standard. If “Blog” had been called “Webiary” (web diary) we’d all be using that term. It doesn’t matter *what* the term is, but once it is established it takes generations to change it. You can’t just suddenly declare that a “blog” is now known as a “webiary” and everyone falls in line. This is where .COM is, imho.

Paul W. Smith Jr., Realty Net Sales.com LLC:

I think also, if you asked the majority you will find their favorite website is a .com. Allot of us visit .com for daily activities. The .com is synonymous with the internet, for instance you can ask people if they have gone to your myspace page and you don’t have to say myspace.com. Also, have you googled it, again, no mention of google.com, just google. Ebay.org, nahhh, that even sounds funny. You can type in google.net and it redirects to the .com. The .com is the internet.

How about your favorite news site, car site, travel site, search site, etc….. Dot com is the gold standard. Name an interest or hobby and I can name a .com website for you but I cannot name a .net or .rw .or .ps, or .tv etc…

Will it change? Possibly but it took a generation to learn, it will take a generation to change.

What do you think?

My latest article just went up at The Industry Standard - YouTube, Hulu & Joost: Is there room all three video sites? Go give it a read.

In that article, I cite some statistics from Compete.com and point to the graphic on those stats - here it is:

I wasn’t really able to go into all the pros and cons of the various services in that article, but thought I would take a bit of time to break things down a bit more here. First of all, YouTube is kicking all other video services butts, and will continue to do so. It has momentum, users and let’s be honest - it’s fun (and easy) to use. Not to mention that YouTube is owned by Google so there is bound to be continuing innovation with the service, which Robert Scoble claims is in the pipeline as I write this.

Joost is in some trouble. The main issue, as far as I can tell, is that they require users to download their proprietary player in order to watch any Joost videos. I was on the site and wanted to check out an episode of MacGyver (who doesn’t?), but I didn’t because I didn’t want to take the time to download Joost to my computer. This will kill them if they don’t fix it.

I love Hulu so far. I am a sucker for a clean design and easy-to-use interface, and Hulu has both. Plus, there were a bunch of TV shows and clips on the site that I was interested in watching, and with a simple click, I was in business. It was easy to use, the video was high-quality and my experience was great. But Hulu isn’t perfect. For example, it’s not available internationally (there are licensing issues), and it has a limited number of videos available at any given time. Perhaps the weirdest thing about Hulu is that although it features embeddable videos, after a period of time those links break because the videos are pulled off the site. Weird. But even so, I really like Hulu.

In fact, here’s a clip from Hulu for your viewing pleasure (at least it will be pleasant if you like The Office). And this is another user testimony for Hulu - even though I know that this video will no longer be available one day, I like the service so much that I am willing to risk it.