ccTLD

Sedo’s Albert Schimmel tweeted a link to an interesting article from India’s Economic Times about the Indian government’s effort to give a boost to .IN domain names. As you probably know, .IN is the ccTLD for the country of India.

For Indian companies and entities, .IN domain names are already fairly popular, although .com is apparently even more popular there. The Indian government, which manages the .IN ccTLD, is planning an advertising campaign to encourage Indians to use .IN domain names.

Here is an excerpt from the  Economic Times  article that discusses this upcoming marketing effort:

URL shorteners became very popular with social media users, particularly users of Twitter. A URL shortener is helpful because it can allow a user to have a longer message if the shortened link is fewer than the 23 characters an automatically shortened link uses (Twitter automatically shortens links to 23 characters with its T.CO links).

From what I have noticed, there are many ccTLD domain names that are used by companies and individuals to act as URL shorteners. Some of these are “branded” shorteners such as Read.bi (Business Insider), NYTI.ms (New York Times), Goo.gl (Google), CNN.it (CNN), ES.pn (ESPN) and NYP.st (NY Post) to name a few. There are also shortener services such as Bitly and X.co to name a couple. Many smaller websites also use their own url shorteners to give them more room for their tweet messages.

According to an article on Bloomberg Technology (Bloom.bg), Twitter plans to

I want to share a humorous domain name business video that I had not seen before. The video was posted to YouTube in 2012, so it’s not a new video, but I think you’ll get a laugh from it.. The video was created on behalf of the Japan Registry Services Company, the operator of the .JP ccTLD extension.

When I discuss what I do for a living, I have found that people are either really super interested or bored out of their minds.

Thanks to Lori Anne Wardi for sharing this video!

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to you, but I don’t have a great deal of experience with ccTLD domain names, aside from seeing them in my travels. I know that Ron Jackson breaks out the ccTLD sales from other domain names in his sales reports, and there are frequently solid sales reported (ie $40,000 last week for SC.TV).

If you are interested in ccTLD domain names, you will want to read an article on The Moz Blog that was published this morning. Eli Schwartz, Online Marketing Manager for SurveyMonkey, published this: “International SEO Study: How Searchers Perceive Country Code Top-Level Domains“.

In the article, Schwartz discusses some research conducted to get user data regarding ccTLDs. The results