If you’ve been fortunate to spend time traveling to other countries, you’ll quickly learn that .com is less important to businesses in some countries. In European countries, local businesses tend to use their own ccTLD extensions. I’ve enjoyed visits to many countries in Europe, and while the biggest – global brands or brands with global aspirations – use .com, the smaller businesses frequently use their local extension.
I was recently doing some outbound marketing on a two word .com domain name. There were numerous businesses that incorporated these two words in their brands, and one operated on the .com.au extension. I thought this Australian company might have an interest in my .com domain name to show its global reach. I was wrong. The CEO of the company told me there was no interest in acquiring my domain name:
“we are an Australian based business. We have no interest in .com domains”
I doubt this is the universal feeling about .com domain names in Australia, but it was pretty surprising to see. Mind you, I mentioned the $40k USD price in the email, so that might have also been an issue for the prospective buyer. I didn’t really have a rebuttal to this beyond mentioning that someone else with global aspirations will probably buy the domain name. That has not happened yet.
When doing outbound marketing, businesses operating on the ccTLD extension might appear to be the best prospective buyers. Some of these businesses operating on .com.something, and being able to remove that extra period and extension seems like it would be a no brainer if the price is right.
This is not a universal feeling though. I recently sold a one word .com to a business operating on the matching .DE domain name. It took a while to reach an agreement, but the .com now forwards to the company’s website. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that reversed, but I don’t know enough about their business or aspirations to know their future plans.
