Watch Your Research: How Misinformation Can Get Spread!
It’s good to know exactly what you’re talking about when you’re talking about it (duh)…sometimes when you don’t, you’ll find yourself spreading information that’s not quite true. I’m sure especially in this day and age of always on-the-go super busy people, this sort of thing happens all the time – people hear one sentence on the news while they’re in the middle of something, don’t hear the next sentence which gave the former one context, and next thing you know they’re spreading some juicy tidbit of news that’s largely incorrect!
In my case, at a live event a week and a half ago, I had many domain discussions with people in which I had quoted my own research on .org domains vs. .net domains, research based on Quantcast’s top 1 million sites list, more importantly before Alexa started coming out with a downloadable top 1 million rankings of their own. I’m a huge .org enthusiast so I was championing the popularity of .org. I hadn’t thought twice about what I said there – I found what I found to be true.
In preparing for posting about .org here on my blog, I went and looked at Alexa’s toplist to confirm my prior research…and I was shocked at what I saw – 43,050 sites on .org domains vs. 65,516 sites on .net domains! Oops – this interesting tidbit of info I had been telling people was a blanket statement of “there’s nearly twice as many .org’s as .net’s in the top 1 million sites on the net” without explaining that it was based on Quantcast’s toplist, which in turn is based on US data. But here again after seeing this, I started to wonder if my brain perhaps played tricks on me before, so to confirm I wasn’t perhaps completely looney and wasn’t seeing things in my initial research, I looked again at Quantcast’s toplist. Whew: 101,936 sites on .org domains vs. 57,873 sites on .net domains, and in fact the .org count was less than 100,000 before so it’s on the rise even!
So – what I was telling people was not completely misleading, but still, I should have been more careful about what I said! Given Quantcast researches US traffic and Alexa researches worldwide traffic, it’s only expected that they may show vastly different results, and in this case there was a difference that shows that while .org IS clearly more popular for US traffic, .net may still have the edge with international traffic. I should have known too – I do fairly regularly look at Alexa’s top 500 sites, usually to see bigger sites as they burst onto the scene, and I HAVE seen a pattern just in that sampling of more Asian-language sites on .net than on .org. It didn’t occur to me to research Alexa’s toplist when it became downloadable to see if that was consistent throughout their top 1 million, which it clearly is.
Moral of the story: Be careful! One misunderstanding in your research could have you on the wrong path, or worse yet could have you spewing misleading information to others as if it was fact! Thankfully I still was right in some context, but I’m sure some people have experienced being horribly wrong and taking a nice reputation hit from not being completely sure of what they were talking about in the first place. Especially now with social media being big and personal branding increasing a lot, the last thing you want to do is screw your trust with people by being wrong on something you’re supposed to be an expert on!
Hi, I think you’re Steve Jones, as stated in your ABOUT link. Hi Steve! This is Stephen.
I wanted to make a comment about providing any information about domain/keyword/site “popularity” based on analysis of Quantcast and/or Alexa – or actually any “public/private” traffic reporting services. All of them are skewed strangely, and none of them can really provide the true facts they portend to do.
Let me try and make this point stick:
If you find a domain you like, and want to know if its site is performing, there’s no way of knowing the results are based on true visitors, such as uniques and comebacks. The domain doesn’t specifically take “all the credit” for the website’s performance, unless the site is a landing PPC page. Even then, it doesn’t take into consideration all the variables of “templinks”, “spammed backlinks”, “SEO keyword spamming” or none of the above. Alexa and Quantcast just cannot provide anyone with realistic evaluations of a domain.
The only thing that can provide you with straightforward discussion and assessment of a domain’s value is a human being that has an understanding of the language, along with social/consumer and business/tech trends, either already established through common use, or expected maturity of the trend.
In other words, experience and instinct from a human can only determine the value of a domain. I never use Alexa (used to about four years ago), and tried Quantcast but saw errors and omissions.
About the extension .org — It is absolutely the second most valuable domain extension, much more valuable than the .net, for one simple reason based on common sense marketing analysis:
.ORG domains are bought and promoted by all the major/minor non-profit organizations, and those .org domains are hoisted into the limelight constantly by the power of these organizations by the millions of dollars in advertising EVERY month.
A .net domain name is a mistake for a domainer to buy UNLESS they plan to use heavy marketing techniques to remind their visitors that the .net extension must be “remembered”, no matter how wonderfully natural the domain word/phrase is. For the user, the .org extension is a “product/service” connect naturally especially if they’ve already understood the domain represents a “non-profit” company. That doesn’t have to be true, but it’s what sells the .org
Nice article.
Stephen Douglas´s last blog ..TESTING A NEW TECHNOLOGY DOMAIN WITH A DOMAINER’S BRAIN