The power of the Internet lies in its limitless reach. And that is where some of these Geo TLDs may lose their luster. Yes, you can capture the “flavor” of a city by branding yourself with a dotNYC or dotParis, but most business owners, including myself, wouldn’t consider branding (limiting?) ourselves with anything but dotCom because all other TLDs, including ccTLDs, brand somewhat contrary to the power of the Internet. DotCom is the definitive brand for the Internet because it has no boundries. They don’t call it the dotCom revolution for nothing. Tim Berners-Lee (the father of the WWW) makes a strong case against new TLDs here: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD

And as I’ve written on this blog before, we had a powerful experience with Rate.com. Rate.net spent a small fortune on advertising and Rate.com’s traffic immediately spiked nearly 1200%. You and I may be too deep in this business to fully understand all the reasons. The bottom line is that the herd thinks differently, they react differently and they will always have the final say about our business.

While you are correct about a successful brand being memorable, there are (at least) two aspects to memory that are useful for this discussion — recognition and reproduction. Recognition means that someone can identify the brand if it’s put in front of them. Reproduction means that they can recreate (by speaking, typing, whatever) the brand entirely from memory. Reproduction is much much harder than recognition, as anyone who has taken a language test in high school or college can attest — it’s a lot easier to read French than to speak it.

A user looking at a search engine result page or a link only has to recognize a brand in order to click — here the advantage of the “default” .com is negligible, especially because the search result page or the website containing the link will provide lots of context and other clues about what the “correct” choice is.

A user reproducing a brand by typing it in to a browser has a much harder task. They are much more likely to get it wrong and end up with a misspelling or a misremembering — which can easily include the TLD extension.

In either case, a very high percentage of people get it “right.” In the case of recognizing a brand and clicking it, the percentage is very high; in the case of type-in navigation, user error is higher, but certainly not even close to a majority, especially given that so much of type-in traffic is either to a frequently-used site where a mistake is immediately recognized and corrected (which I would not count as a navigation) or is from a bookmark.

So, if 15% of all traffic is type-in and the rest from search, and mistaken navigation is rare in search and not a majority from type-ins, then the actual % of mistaken navigation is much less than 15%, and will decline over time as the default position of .com declines.

This is clearly already the case in Europe, Asia, and Canada, where multiple TLDs are the norm; there is no reason to suppose it will be any different in the United States. That’s still a lot of mistaken traffic, and owners of .com names will still benefit, but as percentage it’s small, and certainly not enough to outweigh the benefits of a great name to the left of the dot, compared to a mediocre name with a .com at the end.

Truthfully, if you were registering a new name, would you rather own hotels.nyc or gothamlodging.com?

Also, my statement about Sean Miller was not based upon intuitive traffic. People get hung up on search engines as the proof positive about successful branding and the truth is that search engines have absolutely nothing to do with branding. Successful branding is based 100% upon the viewer’s or listener’s ability to remember (memory) and the number of people who will see or hear an advertisement for a site that ends in dotNYC and then accidentally default to dotCom when they look it up will be much, much higher than 15%.