Type in Traffic - Does it exist on .com.au's?

[Jonathan]

But you said in your last post:

Com.au's have just as much chance of getting highly ranked positions on Google

Parked sites don't ever get highly ranked positions on anything from my experience?

Also the argument that .com.au's will get more type in traffic as web users get more savvy seems disingenuous to me. Type in traffic only exists because some internet users just don't know what they're doing. If an experienced user like you or me wanted to find information on 'widgets', we wouldn't just head over to widgets.com.au and hope for the best, we'd use a search engine and make an informed decision.

 

[Jonathan]

And I think there's a really important distinction between true type in traffic and the kind of type in traffic you're talking about - i.e. People putting in the wrong extension for sites that already exist.

As far as .com.au's go, I don't think anyone on here would dispute that they are totally under valued. I'm not having a go at them - almost my entire portfolio is .com.au - I'm just trying to establish whether anyone is making decent money from type in traffic, or whether development is the only option.

There are people in the .com market making millions of dollars per year exclusively off type in traffic.

 

[Bacon Farmer]

From my experience only the apex domains get any reasonable amount of type ins. I'm talking around 1% of the exacts. But can you find a decent apex to park? When I say apex, I'm talking camping not campinggear. I actually type in domains all the time. It stands to reason if I'm looking for a home loan or a pasta machine there should be something there. Besides Frank and a dozen others I'd be suprised if many were actually making a million a year in the US. You can see the results DBS has had with their portfolio of crap names.

 

[marketingweb]

Excuse my ignorance, but who is "Frank" and "DBS"?

Matt
Marketing Web

 

[Jonathan]

I assume Frank is Frank Schilling (the type in traffic king), DBS is Dark Blue Sea (i.e. the guys who acquired Drop).

By the way BF, that was the weirdest example you used - I acquired CampingGear.com.au literally less than 2 weeks ago.

 

[Max]

But you said in your last post:



Parked sites don't ever get highly ranked positions on anything from my experience?

Also the argument that .com.au's will get more type in traffic as web users get more savvy seems disingenuous to me. Type in traffic only exists because some internet users just don't know what they're doing. If an experienced user like you or me wanted to find information on 'widgets', we wouldn't just head over to widgets.com.au and hope for the best, we'd use a search engine and make an informed decision.

///If an experienced user like you or me wanted to find information on 'widgets', we wouldn't just head over to widgets.com.au and hope for the best, we'd use a search engine and make an informed decision.[////

Thats the difference between Australian web users and American web surfers .. American and other Countries (.co.uk, .de, .fr, etc do type-in domain names to the address bar of their PC ... thats why .com and other extensions, traffic names are so valuable ..

Australians whilst being a small user base (in the big picture) are not educated or motivated to use their address bar .. they are almost soley search engine reliant (google) users even if they know the URL that they are looking for they (for the most part) will still type the name into the search engine search box ...

So many Australian PCs have been taken over by ISP tool bars that they still wont find a particular domain even if they know the address that they want ...

Predictive text used as used by Goog, Yahoo, Bing, (bigpond to a lesser extent) will eventually kill off type-in's to such an extent that only very sophistcated users will ever find a pure type-in URL ...

Aussie's .com.au cant compete on the PPC landing page revenue stage, even with pure generic one word domains ... moral of the story .. build it out then redirect any other .com.au traffic names that you have to the built out site ...

 

[Bacon Farmer]

Sorry yes Mr Frank Schilling and Dark Blue Sea. Being a listed company (not for much longer?) DBS have provided some details of their type in portfolio revenue income.

J, congrats on CampingGear.com.au fabulous purchase, I should have just bid the full price (grr). With a camping store in every town and suburb and plenty of chains, that was a steal.

 

[Jonathan]

Australians whilst being a small user base (in the big picture) are not educated or motivated to use their address bar .. they are almost soley search engine reliant (google) users even if they know the URL that they are looking for they (for the most part) will still type the name into the search engine search box ...

I can definitely appreciate that many less experienced web users don't know how to use the address bar properly - as you say, a lot of them would mistakenly type the URL into the search engine box, or get somehow misdirected in another way.

But I guess when I think of type in traffic, I think of someone who is an inexperienced user looking for a quick answer. For example, someone might be looking for a mortgage, get fed up with the Google results (or not even know how to use a search engine properly), and just type 'mortgage.com' into their address bar out of sheer frustration. That's where I imagine most of the type in crowd's traffic would come from.

So if my premise is correct then it should follow that as internet users get more sophisticated, type in traffic will decline. I'm not sure if this is the case or not - there does seem to be some anecdotal evidence out there that it is: http://morganlinton.com/the-problem-with-duplicate-content/

Aussie's .com.au cant compete on the PPC landing page revenue stage, even with pure generic one word domains ... moral of the story .. build it out

I think this is spot on. Still, I do find it interesting that Australia seems to be 'underperforming' on the type in scene. You mention that other ccTLD's do get proportionally more type in traffic - do you have any stats on that?

J, congrats on CampingGear.com.au fabulous purchase, I should have just bid the full price (grr). With a camping store in every town and suburb and plenty of chains, that was a steal.

Thanks BF This one is definitely high up on my development list.

 

[Max]

///I do find it interesting that Australia seems to be 'underperforming' on the type in scene. You mention that other ccTLD's do get proportionally more type in traffic - do you have any stats on that?///

I dont have any stats on that, only my own experience ... .co.uk i can personally vouch for, many other domainers can do the same with a variety of global TLDs ...

www.compete.com can be used for .com USA traffic, it also can give an indication of other GTLD traffic .. not very accurate but a good indicator ...

 

[Lorenzo]

///If an experienced user like you or me wanted to find information on 'widgets', we wouldn't just head over to widgets.com.au and hope for the best, we'd use a search engine and make an informed decision.[////

Thats the difference between Australian web users and American web surfers .. American and other Countries (.co.uk, .de, .fr, etc do type-in domain names to the address bar of their PC ... thats why .com and other extensions, traffic names are so valuable ..

Australians whilst being a small user base (in the big picture) are not educated or motivated to use their address bar .. they are almost soley search engine reliant (google) users even if they know the URL that they are looking for they (for the most part) will still type the name into the search engine search box ...

So many Australian PCs have been taken over by ISP tool bars that they still wont find a particular domain even if they know the address that they want ...

Predictive text used as used by Goog, Yahoo, Bing, (bigpond to a lesser extent) will eventually kill off type-in's to such an extent that only very sophistcated users will ever find a pure type-in URL ...

Aussie's .com.au cant compete on the PPC landing page revenue stage, even with pure generic one word domains ... moral of the story .. build it out then redirect any other .com.au traffic names that you have to the built out site ...

its not just aussies...around the world , internet savvy people are just a very limited part of general internet users, otherwise Facebook would not be full of ads.....just to name one example.

There is a long way to go for people to really improve on web surfing.

I believe type-in traffic is going to decrease as more competitors come online with different names, but a minimun amount of it will always exist.

 

[Jonathan]

I dunno, I'm not sure how much the ads thing is related to how savvy an internet user is. Granted, a lot of people are 'tricked' into clicking on ads, but when I am explicitly looking to buy a product or service I have no problem clicking an ad.