jmccormac - 9:01 pm on Jan 27, 2010 (gmt 0)

The .pro TLD is a classic dot.bomb era idea. It even made the first year business school mistake when quantifying its potential market. It claimed that the .com TLD had n registrations so therefore it could get n/x percent of that market. At the time, most ccTLD registries were run by universities and people who hadn't much of a clue about business and it seemed that there was a good market niche for this kind of TLD. There was but it was a time limited market. The TLD launched and then the whole dot.bomb collapse happened. It never really recovered from this and all the time, the ccTLDs were growing.

A lot of the growth in .pro would, I think, be driven by domain speculation (the keyword domains being registered and then parked). The problem with direct navigation is that it requires people to type the website url into the browser address bar thinking that such a site exists. That type-in is generally .com or in ccTLD dominant countries, that country's ccTLD. The .pro domains have to rely on appearance in search engine results. That might work but the hard part is getting the site noticed.

The enforcement of registration conditions might have been a good idea but without it, it in the same situation as .biz but without that gTLD's figures.

Regards...jmcc