Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelli58
(Post 18001483)
Actually V_Rocks makes a good point. The counties banning the .xxx right now are those we don't really tend to attempt to market to in the first place. At least not the mainstream porn sites.
How many sites really target Indian or Middle Eastern traffic? I know I don't. I'm not in support of .xxx but really this isn't that big of an obstacle for the new top-level domain because it just means you got rid of a bunch of free loaders you couldn't convert anyway.
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Even traffic that can't be converted has value, particularly for free sites.
If you don't agree with me on that point, that's fine; I have my reasons for believing it, and they are rooted in nearly 15 years of working with adult website traffic of varying degrees of quality. In that time, I have never found a type of traffic that I couldn't draw some manner of benefit from (yes, even bot traffic, as odd as that might sound).
Look at it this way: when listing the benefits of .XXX, the ease of blocking/filtering it is actually stated as a 'plus' by ICM Registry.
That might sound good to some people at first glance, but think about it a little further, and put that notion in the context of what the Internet itself is supposed to be, and you might conclude that it isn't such a good thing, after all.
Set aside for a moment whether easy blocking/filtering might be perceived as a benefit by parents who want to keep their kids from watching porn, or by consumers who don't approve of porn at all and will take what they can get in terms of restrictions on porn distribution, and consider that at its core, the whole point of the
'world wide web' is to provide
global access to content and information.
Some of what's out there on the web is good content/information, some of it is bad content/information, some of it is downright harmful content/information, but the 'web default' has always been to provide access to, and a free exchange of, ideas, expression and information.
When a website or piece of online information or content is illegal, damaging, or otherwise problematic, it might end up being pulled down from the web, or blocked on an individual basis, but attempts to prevent such things from being accessed online in the first place have never included wholesale blocking and filtering of entire TLDs. Not even places like China, Saudi Arabia or North Korea block entire TLDs, so far as I'm aware (if I'm wrong, please do correct me on that; maybe they do block some entire country code TLDs?).
Given that, why on earth would I think of the ease of blocking an entire TLD as being among the "good" reasons to pay roughly 6x market price per domain on I register on the TLD in question?
I can't speak for anybody else, but from my perspective, coughing up
more money for domains that by their very nature are likely to receive
less traffic and exposure (and serve to splinter my branding at the same time, no less) is not what I'd call a sensible basis for purchase. :2 cents:
