Domain Naming Advice

Bugatti

I'm looking for some advicing regarding the naming of a website I'm creating. My preferred choice of domain is already taken. It's a 3 word domain. I don't want to say the name here but let's say, for the benefit of this thread, the name I wanted to use was thecityauction.com (which is already taken). Also taken are the following:
cityauction.com
city.autcion

Avaiable are the following:
thecity.auction
thecityauction.org
thecityauction.net

Also this is not a regional site so a .ie or co.uk domain wouldn't work for me.

thecityauction.com is not being used but so far I haven't found the details of the domain onwer to enquire about the possibility of selling. cityauction.com is available to buy but the seller is looking for $1,100.

Would I be fine to use one of the available domains, such as thecity.auction? Or in the long term would it be a better investment to pay what it takes to get either of the .com's? Is there any alternative I should consider?

Graham

Bugatti wrote: »

Would I be fine to use one of the available domains, such as thecity.auction? Or in the long term would it be a better investment to pay what it takes to get either of the .com's? Is there any alternative I should consider?

I wouldn't use thecity.auction domain.

I'd like to think I'm fairly well clued up on the new gtlds but until about 30 seconds ago I'd no idea .auction even existed.

The main problem with using a .auction domain is you have to teach your customers that .auction is a thing. That's before you even begin the process of getting them to remember your domain name.

It would be an interesting test to ask 100 people to open a browser and go to thecity.auction, I bet you a significant chunk of those 100 people would end up at thecityauction.com.

Bugatti

Thanks for the feedback Graham.

Another question I had meant to ask in my OP, if my business name was The City Auction and my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram pages all used this name as well, would it cause confusion if I bought the domain cityauction.com?

Also if I decided against using a tld, what is the best alternative to a .com, net or org?

Graham

Bugatti wrote: »

Another question I had meant to ask in my OP, if my business name was The City Auction and my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram pages all used this name as well, would it cause confusion if I bought the domain cityauction.com?

It is likely to cause some confusion if they're not all the same but there's not a lot you can do about that. Very very few business are able to find an available domain name where the Facebook/Twitter/Instagram names are also available.

Bugatti wrote: »

Also if I decided against using a tld, what is the best alternative to a .com, net or org?

If you're trying to reach a global audience and your desired .com isn't available, the best alternative is a different .com.

Bugatti

Going back to a point you made in your first post Graham:

Graham wrote: »

It would be an interesting test to ask 100 people to open a browser and go to thecity.auction, I bet you a significant chunk of those 100 people would end up at thecityauction.com.

If people are directly typing the url into the browser, they most likely already know the site they are looking for.

If they just type in the name (eg. The City Auction) into the browser than as long as the site is ranking highly shouldnt users still easily find it?

Graham

Bugatti wrote: »

Going back to a point you made in your first post Graham:



If people are directly typing the url into the browser, they most likely already know the site they are looking for.

If they just type in the name (eg. The City Auction) into the browser than as long as the site is ranking highly shouldnt users still easily find it?

If you tell 100 people your domain is thecity.auction, how many of them will type it correctly into their browser?

I say this as someone that has several domains in the new gtlds, they are just not recognised by a very large chunk of the population. You will suffer for it, probably to the advantage of thecityauction.com.

Bugatti

Graham wrote: »

If you tell 100 people your domain is thecity.auction, how many of them will type it correctly into their browser?

I say this as someone that has several domains in the new gtlds, they are just not recognised by a very large chunk of the population. You will suffer for it, probably to the advantage of thecityauction.com.

But would they not be more likely to type "the city auction" to find the site rather than entering the full URL? I don't have any figures to back this up, more a personal opinion of mine so I'm open to correction on this!

In terms of suffering to the .com domain, well the name that is taken is only a parked domain. So it wouldn't be something I'm directly competing with.

Graham

Bugatti wrote: »

But would they not be more likely to type "the city auction" to find the site rather than entering the full URL? I don't have any figures to back this up, more a personal opinion of mine so I'm open to correction on this!

I'm not going to try and convince you your opinion is wrong, you might be right for your target market. Who knows.

The only way you're going to find out with any degree of confidence is to run a test with some of your target market.

Bugatti wrote: »

In terms of suffering to the .com domain, well the name that is taken is only a parked domain. So it wouldn't be something I'm directly competing with.

So what happens when your thecity.auction site takes off? You think thecityauction.com isn't going to make the most of the typo traffic? If I owned the cityauction.com, I'd have it plastered in adverts and/or offer to sell it to you after I'd added a couple of zeros to the price. Either that or I'd point it at eBay and collect referral fees.

Let me put it another way. There is probably a reason you can't think of a single successful site currently operating in one of the new GTLDs.

Added:

you know who you should listen to before me, jmcc. When it comes to knowing what's going on with domain names jmcc is the domain oracle, go read any of his posts on the subject.

mneylon

We've been using new TLDs in online and offline marketing for the last couple of years. Putting thecity.auction (as per the OP's example) probably would cause confusion, but using www.thecity.auction or adding the http bit can help
Sure, people are still more accustomed to seeing a .ie or a .com, but there are a growing number of companies both Irish and international using new domain extensions
So if you can find a really good marketable domain in a new extension it'll trump (in my view) a hard to spell, long and not particularly memorable domain in .com

Websites4u

good luck with your business. nearly all good .com domains, even .ie's are taken. if you can get thecityauction.com for $1,100, if you really want that domain, its not that expensive considering domains have sold for millions in the past.

With more and more apps being used, domain names may be irrelevant in the future. As domain names are being taken up, i think more companies will use other TLD's such as abc.auction , i recently bought a domain for a customer "sparrow.style" as everything else was taken. i assume more and more customers will have to do this. google use abc.xyz as their parent company domain name.

in short, if i was really going to spend a lot of time pushing this company, i would buy thecityauction.com. if not, i would be happy to buy abc.auction as in 10 years, you might not be able to get that as someone else would own it.