Apparently Domain Names ARE Important…

July 8th, 2008

5 comments

Posted in: Industry Pulse

Last week I posted an article about top-level domains, and added some of my own pithy analysis. Rather than keeping to the topic at hand, I started rambling about various other topics, and I asked “are domain names REALLY that important anymore?” In response, a reader named Bruno emailed me the following:

I would like to add that Direct Navigation, or traffic received from users typing the domain name directly into the address bar - bypassing search engines - amounts for a large percentage of overall Internet traffic (I don’t have the exact number off the top of my head). I have a personal portfolio of names, and have many colleagues that also do, that receive thousands of views/day from this type of traffic, without any marketing or seo.

He’s absolutely right - direct navigation has always been a very significant portion of overall internet traffic; a 2003 study found that 64% of internet traffic was via direct navigation. Much of that navigation is “good” domain names of generic things - if I want pizza, isn’t pizza.com a good place to look? However, there’s only a finite number of names like this, so everyone else must be getting direct traffic through other methods that aren’t so random.

But, my question is, how much of this traffic is due to a “wicked good” domain name, and how much is because of bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc.? I’d never randomly navigate to woot.com based on the domain name (is it about owls? Who knows?) but it’s bookmarked in all my browsers and it’s my first stop every morning.

…after I visit chitika.com, of course.

So I guess the point of this rebuttal is this - domain names are, indeed, very important, but so are all the other tools to drive traffic to your site, gain an audience, make money…

5 Responses to “ Apparently Domain Names ARE Important… ”

1. 
   nmw Says:
   July 9th, 2008 at 6:44 am

   For some people, domain names don’t matter at all — they just use the “blue e” on the desktop to search.

   OTOH, there are over 270 top TLDs — and I’d wager that the *only* 2 strings that are registered in each & every TLD are “sex” and “google”.

   The Internet is *still* wide open — generally, it’s mainly Americans who believe it ends at .COM

   :) nmw

2. 
   jn Says:
   July 9th, 2008 at 4:36 pm

   nmw - that’s because we follow the money/traffic. .com’s receive direct navigation and other extensions do not.

3. 
   funnygirl Says:
   August 7th, 2008 at 8:29 am

   +100. Respect. ;)

4. 
   Bookmarks about Browsers Says:
   October 26th, 2008 at 2:15 am

   [...] - bookmarked by 5 members originally found by nzdvc3 on 2008-10-10 Apparently Domain Names ARE Important… http://chitika.com/blog/2008/07/08/apparently-domain-names-are-important/ - bookmarked by 1 [...]

5. 
   Aurelio Says:
   November 9th, 2009 at 3:06 am

   Rules are meant to be broken, I agree, and with most logos available to view online, we’re needing to push boundaries further to differentiate the outcome.I think context plays a big part in dispelling some of those rules / guidelines you mention. For instance, not all logos need to be shown at just an inch in size, or using only one colour. Using those pointers, however, can dramatically improve the adaptability of the design, and for me, the vast majority of client requests include them in some shape or form.

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