jmccormac - 12:19 am on Jan 9, 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.

That's the characteristic that determines whether a TLD is successful or not - the fact that small businesses use it. Usage cascades from that point onwards so that the TLD's use becomes an automatic choice for any new business. Many new .com domains are being registered by ccTLD registrants for brand protection. However rather than the .com being used as the primary brand site, the .com is pointed to the ccTLD.

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).

I don't have a very high opinion of Google's expertise when it comes to local search outside of the US.

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.

Building a good timeline of web development in a TLD has been made a bit more difficult by the use of CMSes like Joomla and Wordpress but it is not impossible. I'd have to dig up the precise figures but between 20% and 40% of sites in some TLDs do not change over the course of a year.

With a lower cost of registration, people will register more but the same urgency of development, as there would be if the registration was more expensive, is not there. It is not unusual to find clusters of .com domains pointing to one domain.

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

This is the classic dotCOMmunist defence. :) In business, all the traffic in the world is no good if that traffic doesn't convert.

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.

What most people never see is that many TLDs live and die without ever having being developed. People see TLDs being measured in millions or tens of millions of domains, but the reality is that the level of development can vary from 10% to 40% depending on the TLD. This is only something that you see when you do large website surveys and it is often in the best interests of the registries to do small surveys and extrapolate the results of checking a few thousand websites to cover millions of websites.

What I often see is people trying to classify entire TLDs as being one market. As with the real world, it is possible to see borders delineating country level markets in .com and the other TLDs. Transnational businesses will use .com but there's also a growing Adjacent Markets effect where businesses targeting markets outside their own country will use a local ccTLD domain for that targeting rather than .com.

Regards...jmcc