.me took over .travel
This is month .me is all about breaking the records and beating the peers. Right after it had 250,000th .me domain registered on 15th of May, in less than a year of its existence, .me took over .travel, by both, the number of registered domains and number of pages indexed by Google.
While .me went live just on 17th of June 2008, .travel is already live for longer than three years (.travel registrations opened in earlier 2006). Although both names are catchy, the length of the latter, six characters, versus two to four characters for a typical top-level-domain (TLD) must be seen as a clear disadvantage.
Let's mark 7,500,000+ .me pages indexed by Google as on 31st of May 2009 as another significant milestone and see whether .travel will be ever able to catch up with less than 6,900,000 pages it managed to build over the last three years and a bit.
In the past, .me already got above .asia, .me.uk, .pro, .museum, .jobs, and remains unchallenged by the new rival .tel.
It is too earlier to say when, but the next opponents will certain.ly be .int, .name, .mobi, .cat, .biz, .tv, and hopeful.ly one day .info.
Short link:
Copy - http://links2.me/~LZE1$CN
July 7th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
.me also took over .int, .mil, and .name, at least by the number of pages indexed by Google.
This is just another proof that jingling is more important than just a good name and the length of the brand cannot be ignored too.
July 27th, 2009 at 7:03 am
No wonder, just have a look at this one:
http://BeachResort.me/
Sure.ly I will book on the above site, not BeachResort.Travel. The latter sounds just so http://un.natural.ly
August 28th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Just stumbled upon this post..congratulations on this milestone.
However, I would like to add that I feel you are not comparing apples to apples. Many of the examples you gave, in particular .travel, are highly specified domains. Although I believe intended from montenegro, .me is more generic in nature which can allow for a broader, less industry specific expansion. I have yet to get my .me. I guess I am wondering, are there examples of influential businesses or people that are using .me?
Thank you for your post.
August 28th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
@AJ: good point. One year of .ME is nice.ly summarised in recent.ly released white paper, which also included top names and brands:
It can be downloaded on:
http://Brands-and-Jingles.com/white-papers/2009%20-%20Brands-and-Jingles%20-%20one%20year%20of%20dot%20me%20-%20for%20marketeers.pdf
August 28th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Most of good .me are gone. However, one can still hunt for premium ones, like http://dot-me.of-cour.se/2009/08/27/premium-me-auctions-namejet-september-2009/