Quadrille - 11:24 pm on Jan 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

Most business is local? No. Most businesses are local, most business is NOT. The number of local businesses may be large, but they are nearly all small businesses.

This is the WWW - the clue is in the title. :)

Search Google (or Bing, if you insist) and see how many local sites turn up in the top ten, in any category where 'local' isn't the name of the game (eg bars, butchers, non-chain garden centres).

These days, every tom dick and harry wants a website as well as an unreadable blog, and local is usually cheaper ... and if purely local, probably best. But in the big picture, .com is where the serious money is, was ... and will continue to be. [I'm only referring to English language sites - outside English, the advantages of .com are not so great]

And what do we mean by local? local within a country (eg pubs, bars) would be wasting money with a .com; nothing to gain in cash, SE, or reputation. But national companies want to be associated with multinational ones, especially if they compete against them in their own markets, or have aspirations. They don't want to be seen as local. And I'd guess the number of moribund or dormant local sites beats the similar .coms by many a mile; a dumped local site will stay dumped - but there's a very healthy (if very scammy) .com resale market.

And the number of visitors to .com site dwarfs the rest put together.

The TLD debate is not just about numbers, it's about marketing and aspiration: and no-one with aspirations goes for .biz, .info ... and in many cases, they won't go for local.