Large company Interbrand specializes in strategy development and promotion of brands and makes annual rankings of 100 best brands of the world. It conducted a research to find out whether the name of the domain has influence on brand’s perspectives. The result is clear: success can be expected only in the .COM domain zone.
When trying to remember some web address, 94% of the participants could name only addresses in the .COM domain zone. Only 7% remembered an address in one of the new domain zones. After that participants were shown a specially created page of search results. The first lines were occupied by links to webpages registered in the new domain zones. Links to the webpages in .COM zone were placed lower. Nevertheless, 61% of participants chose links in .COM domain to visit.
In the next step, participants were to visit a webpage in one of the new domain zones. Afterwards they were asked to remember the name of the resource. 81% of those surveyed were sure that the webpage was registered in the .COM domain zone.
It is worth to mention that the study was conducted among American users, US citizens are not well aware that there are other domain zones, nevertheless, the results speak for themselves.
