Why .ME will always be international
In our previous article, .ME in various languages, research provided by Brands-and-Jingles discovered that only 10% of content within .me zone was in Serbian. With nearly half of pages written in English, no one doubted the international scope of this top level domain.
Let us now have a look at it from the different angle: the ratio of number of pages in Serbian language within .me to that within .com is 1:84 (in fact it is one of the highest among all countries and languages followed by Chinese, but pre-empted by English). It is not only about Montenegro, it is about all Serbian speaking counties, for Republic of Serbia (.rs) this ratio is 1:96 and for former Yugoslavia (.yu) - 1:72. Combined together for all Serbian countries in former Yugoslavia the ratio is still above 1:40.
Hence, most of the Serbian content is in .com - a historic decision difficult to rule out.
Considering the small population of the region and Slavic names not interfering with English ones - .me will indeed remain a truly international top level domain attracting English speakers and those looking for English domain jingles.
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Copy - http://links2.me/~UUS2$Ar
May 3rd, 2009 at 3:02 am
[…] in .com and .net rather its local ccTLD (for the historical, political and economical reasons): Why .ME will always be international « .ME of course Thus, I would focus on good gTLDs, with local names, like short ones 1ua1.com, 1ua1.net and some […]
May 24th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Probably the best evidence will be statistics from Alexa:
No one can pretend now that Serbia and Montenegro with less than 1.5% are very representative in .me world. It is all about English and Germans and other Europeans (apparent.ly) talking new lingua franca.
May 24th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Surprising.ly enough, .travel registry is 10 times more popular in Montenegro than .me one (at least percentage wise):
May 26th, 2009 at 11:23 am
[…] no doubt. This was _never_ a ccTLD in its way. As .me is 90% International too – the same story: .ME of course « Why .ME will always be international __________________ Yours.Sincere.ly, http://Dot-Me.Of-Cour.se/ Up-to-date industry analysis […]
October 17th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
A bit of history indeed:
On 21 May, 2006 a majority of Montenegrins supported independence in a national referendum. On 3 June, 2006, Montenegro declared its independence from Serbia and Montenegro. As a constituent part of that country, the Republic of Montenegro had been unofficially been using the cg.yu SLD whilst the .cs TLD had been assigned to Serbia and Montenegro in 2003 following the breakup of Yugoslavia, but remained unused by that country. The .cg (Crna Gora) TLD could not be assigned to Montenegro on the basis of the new country’s Montenegrin name, because it had been the TLD of the Republic of the Congo since 1997. This left the newly independent state without an obvious TLD based on its Montenegrin name.
On 23 May, 2006, Ilan Shavit, a Tel Aviv lawyer active in the field of internet domains, made a written application to ICANN requesting that the .me TLD be assigned to Montenegro, stating that “The country is known worldwide as Montenegro and calls itself by that name internationally. The only appropriate free TLD commencing with .m is .me (.mo, .mn, .mt, .mg and .mr are all taken). [This would parallel the similarly odd use of “MO” for Missouri.) It would appear to be fair and logical for this TLD to be granted to Montenegro – which would be a wonderful gift to the country by ICANN on the occasion of its historical declaration of independence, and allow it a clean start”. In September 2007, this position was accepted and ICANN resolved that .me be delegated to the Government of Montenegro, with the former .yu domain to be operated temporarily by the .rs domain registry, Serbian National Register of Internet Domain Names, until its eventual abolition on or before 30 September 2009.
On 11 September 2007, delegation of root name servers was approved by IANA, establishing .me. The .me domain became active on 24 September 2007 and a “Public Invitation for selection of the Agent for domain registration under the national Internet domain of Montenegro” was posted on 14 November. doMEn d.o.o. was selected as the new registry operator.
doMEn, d.o.o. is a Montenegro based joint venture (doing business as .ME Registry) whose partners are Afilias Limited, GoDaddy.com, Inc., and ME-net d.o.o.
May 6th, 2008 – .me Registry – General Sunrise began for all eligible Trademark holders anywhere in the world.
On July 16, 2008, registration was made available for all .me domains at various registrars.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.me
October 31st, 2009 at 10:06 pm
Another interesting fact: as of today Google has indexed some 5,770,000,000 pages in the Chinese zone .CN [ http://google.com/search?q=site%3Acn ].
Then in the Indian zone .IN – only 286,000,000 [ http://google.com/search?q=site%3Ain ] ~ 20 times less! A huge difference indeed. A paradox? Maybe. Two neighbouring countries with approximately the same population – so drastically different Internet habits.
Any thoughts why?
I guess it is that Indians also love other domains, .com mainly, but Indian.Me too.
January 13th, 2010 at 7:16 pm
[…] Extra history on the rising of .me can be found on our past article: Why .ME will always be international. […]
January 30th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Well, some domains will be Montenegrin, despite the good English names. Even grand names: http://grand.me/
May 8th, 2010 at 3:44 am
This is not fair, Montenegrins speak Montenegrin and not Serbian, also a fact Yugoslavia had four major South Slavic languages: Slovene, Macedonian, Serbian and Croatian.
Stop making such claims that all former Yugoslavs spoke Serbian. It is not true and it is defamatory.
May 8th, 2010 at 9:12 am
@ Montenegrin : you are completely right.
In fact, the post did not question the existence of Montenegrin as a language, but merely relied on Google that indexes various languages. Since Montenegrin is of the same group as Serbian and Croatian – they consolidate it under one item. We would ideally love to see the statistics per language, but such date is not available at the moment.
In any case, the metrics is pretty reliable when comparing the regional use of .me versus the global one. But this, the argument is well presented.