caveman - 3:45 pm on May 15, 2007 (gmt 0)

AFAIK, the bad reputation of .info's is limited to a subset of Web people. It's so interesting that people get all wrapped up in debates about things like this. I love it because misunderstandings create market opportunity for those looking at real data instead of the mirror. ;-)

About 10% of the sites I own are .info's, including one I paid several thousand dollars for, two years ago. And I see virtually no reason not to own them.

In the real world, I see NO difference in click through or conversion of my .info domains versus my .com's. That tells me that while consumers clearly attach some signficance to .com's (certainly that's the default type-in for example), they do not seem to hold .info against a site when deciding to click on SERP listing. That being the case, it's down to the name itself.

If there is no hyphen or perhaps one, one or two keywords, and the keywords are core to the category or even just high value niche within a category, that is the main thing IMO.

Clearly, one cannot assume much type in traffic, if any, when making the choice to buy a .info, but that is no reason not to buy one. The buyer simply factors the absense of type-in into the value equation.

In the last two months I renewed over 300 .infos. Got no idea what I'm going to do with them yet. But I sure ain't about to drop them. Heck, I could sell one of them and pay for the annual renewal fees of the lot. :p