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UK Domain Name RegistrationTHE bulk of Britain's small businesses have snubbed the .tv and .biz internet suffixes introduced in 2000, branding them either "cheap" or "unprofessional". A survey of SMEs found they had less credibility than the more established generic top level domain (TLD) identifications such as .com and .co.uk. However, a number of bigger organisations, such as broadcasters GMTV and Five, along with Liverpool FC's television channel and the ParliamentLivechannel have adopted the .tv suffix. The poll of just under 200 firms by Alternative Investment Market-listed internet software publisher KTS found 94 per cent of respondents claiming that the .tv suffix - which originally belonged to the tiny Pacific island of Tuvalu, which sold it to a Californian internet company for $50 million - conferred the least credibility on a business. And 74 per cent of business owners said the domain suffixes sounded either cheap or unprofessional, detracting from a company's brand image. More marginally favoured - by 65 per cent - was the .net suffix. The web address ending voted favourite was .co.uk, with 59 per cent giving it the thumbs up. But bosses decided most credibility was attached to owning a .com address, with 35 per cent backing it. Just six per cent thought .biz the most credible. Very few companies in the UK have adopted the .biz ending, with a web search returning just a handful, including London-based web developer Wisechoice and Gower-based bike group Kickbike. |
However, in the United States it had been selected by the National Small Business Association.
According to a recent survey by Netcraft, in November there were 74,572,794 websites in the world, with around 17.5 million added over 2005, easily surpassing the previous 16 million new sites registered during the height of the dotcom boom in 2000.
KTS found 47 per cent of those polled saying that the domain suffix was an important part of the firm's branding, while 53 per cent said it was not.
Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer, chief executive of KTS, said: "Dot biz hasn't done the biz among the commercial community. And .tv and .net are not perceived as much cop either, lacking the same sort of lustre which .co.uk or .com have for a company's image.
"This is worth bearing in mind if you are looking at registering a new web domain."
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) assumes responsibility for web address allocation and protocol parameter assignment.
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