I am currently on vacation in Amsterdam – doing my best to unplug which is why I haven’t posed in the past week. One thing that I always pay attention to when I travel abroad is what TLD they use with their advertisements. In Amsterdam .NL has definitely taken-over .COM as it is the TLD used in about 95% off all the advertisements I have seen on the street, on TV, and in magazines.
There are many people that focus on "Trend Domaining" – taking advantage of certain trends to get popular or soon-to-be popular domain names. Our company has done this with "Stimulus checks" -related domain names as this trend turned-out to be a big money-maker for us.
So what is the next big money-maker in .NL? I haven’t spent much time looking at what’s available but I can tell you that any name related to "coffee shops", "canals", "Museums", "bikes", or any combination with one of the city’s many area’s like Leidseplein or Jordaan.
Amsterdam is a major destination in Europe and the .NL TLD has clearly been adopted as the standard going forward. I’ll be heading to France soon so will be able to provide some insight into more TLD’s across Europe. I’d be interested to know if there are any Dutch Domainers that read my blog that might have some more thoughts on .NL…
Happy Flipping and Hello from Amsterdam!
.nl is nr 4 in countrycodes behind .cn/.co.uk/.de with only 16 million people 3 mln registered .nl remains
per inhabitant nr 1 in the world:) in domainregistrations
82 % of the people have access to the internet(nr 3 behind Korea and Denmark)
nr 2 in fastdsl connections(behind denmark)
97 % of companies use the internet
81 % of the population is at least once a week online for an average of 12 hours a week
Apart from the widespread connectivity other reasons for the amount of .nl registrations according to the “national supplier of domains”
-widespread number of registrars
-ease and speed with which anyone all over the world can obtain a .nl domain
-creativity of the dutch, which by the way caused the longest average domains in the world,average 16 characters vs 13 for other tld’s
marketshare for.nl in The Netherlands is 70 % vs 14 % .com and 9 %.eu(Find this hard to believe about.eu as I hardly ever see any).
As 90-95 % of the Dutch understands and speaks English it is kind of a contradiction that we have all these .nl domains.You would expect more national tld’s in France or Italy where the use of English is less than in the Netherlands.
Supply creates demand I guess.