Perhaps you may not realise this but .ER is the country code TLD for Eritrea. Anything that requires the user to add more software to their browser or mail client or use custom nameservers will always be a difficult thing to sell. The whole psychological error correction thing has been a problem for many unknown TLDs and new gTLDs in that many people wil omit the dot and just add .com to the end of the name.

Regards...jmcc

I'm not really looking at a .ER extension, that was completely made up for the example. I just couldn't think of a noun that ended with .us or whatever ;-P

In reality, I own a range of 65 domains that follow a specific pattern, but I'll never be able to get the remaining 35 domains that I want; some are for sale for exorbitant prices, others are owned by government entities. So my options are to consider alternate tlds, or just forget about them entirely.

The phrases "Alternate TLDs" (or "Alternative TLDs") generally has a different meaning to some in the domain name business. It means TLDs that are not part of the main root zone ( [iana.org...] ). The ccTLDs often have their own rules and can they can be different to those for the gTLDs. The rule of thumb with obscure ccTLDs in a .COM or main ccTLD dominated market is forget about them unless you have the money to spend on marketing. People have an expectation that a new site will use the most popular TLD in their market. For the US, that's the .COM. For Ireland, it is the .IE etc. While .COM still has massive brand recognition outside of the US, the smaller gTLDs and many of the new gTLDs struggle in those markets. Typically the ccTLD/.COM axis in most markets occupies about 80% of the registered domain names.

Regards...jmcc

I'm not really looking at a .ER extension, that was completely made up for the example.

even before the branding or promo considerations, you almost certainly want a gTLD or at least a ccTLD that is treated as a gTLD by google.

What you're referring to is called a domain hack [en.wikipedia.org]. I think it works best for a technical audience.

I see it mostly with URL shorteners (youtu.be) and personal domains, not so much with commercial sites.

What matters is the target audience "get it"

I know of someone that registered and it just doesn't work as they intended because the vast majority of people don't realise there's anything other than .com, or their ccTLD

I had this problem when I had a .info domain. It sounded great, but I had a conversation that went something like this.

"Its example.info"

"So its example.com"

"You mean example.info.com"

"No, just exampe.info"

Tangentially...

but .ER is the country code TLD for Eritrea

Is that a problem? I’m sure Eritrea can use the money. After all, .gl as in goo.gl is Greenland; .be as in youtu.be is Belgium and so on. If they’re smart, they are making non-residents pay through the nose for their orthographically convenient cctld.

Mea culpa, a "domain hack" :-D

Thanks for the input! Oh well, I was hoping things had changed by now. I know that 99% of my original users will be clicking on either a link on one of my other sites or Google, so the extension doesn't really matter then. But when they try to come back to the site, I guess that's when it all falls apart.

These domain squatters are killing me! There's one domain that I especially want, it was registered in 1999 and used for 1 year before just turning in to a Server Error. I've been trying to buy it for YEARS, even sent a letter offering $50,000 and they can continue using it for email or whatever else they currently use it for! No reply, ever. But there's just nothing I can do but let my business sit stagnant :-/

Google has the marketing power to make goo.gl relevant but it I think that other url shorteners are more widely used. The Belgian .BE ccTLD has the biggest share of the Belgian domain name market but Google, again, has the marketing power and money to make the domain hack relevant. The ccTLDs that permit foreign registrations make even more money, by registration volume, from brand protection registrations by large brands.

Regards...jmcc

They are not domain squatters. They registered the domain name first. A generic keyword domain name is nice to have but it takes a lot of marketing. People seem more inclined to remember brands rather than generics. (Google, Twitter, Facebook etc). A brand domain name is also more legally defensible with trademarks or service marks. The big scare story against using what seems to be a good domain name in an obscure TLD is that of Overstock's o.co decision. It lost 60% of the traffic to the heavily promoted o.co to the .COM domain equivalent which was not even active.

Regards...jmcc

Tangentially...

but .ER is the country code TLD for Eritrea

Is that a problem?

it is if you are worried about international targeting in search results.

for example, the following document lists the ccTLDs which are treated as gTLDs by google:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/managing-multi-regional-sites#generic-domains

Generic Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs): Google treats some ccTLDs (such as .tv and .me) as gTLDs, as we've found that users and website owners frequently see these more generic than country-targeted. Here is a list of those ccTLDs (this list may change).

this list does not include the .er domain, so this domain in search results will be targeted to Eritrean searchers.

Well, .ES, .IN, .SH, and .LAND aren't listed, either. That poo poos all over any plans I might have had! LOL

I'm surprised that .EU and .ASIA are listed, but not .US. Unless any of them fall under the and many more... condition they gave?

.us is a ccTLD (since 1985)

But it's not one that Google recognizes as a gTLD?

no - you can see the list of "ccTLDs as gTLDs" in the url in provided above.

That's what I was talking about at 8:12, that it's funny that Google doesn't recognize .US as a gTLD per your list. So we're saying the same thing, just in different directions :-)

The problem with treating Google's opinion on anything to do with domain names is that you are effectively dealing with just how Google treats domain names because of the difficulty in precisely identifying the market the websites are targeting.

When it comes to ccTLDs, there are essentially three types.

The first is ccTLDs that only allow registrations from within their markets. (No foreign registrations allowed.)

The second is ccTLDs that allow foreign registrations but registrations are overwhelmingly local.

The third is ccTLDs that have been repurposed as open TLDs with little or no restrictions on registrations. (.TV, ,WS, .CO etc)

The .EU is a kind of regional TLD rather than a ccTLD even though it is officially a ccTLD. The .ASIA is a regional gTLD that covers a number of countries and territories. The .EU is under European Union legislation and the .ASIA is an ICANN gTLD. The inclusion of .GOV in the list of gTLDs is a good example of Google's issues with domain names. The .GOV is a US TLD that is only open to US government agencies. The .EDU globalised but it still has restrictions on registrations. (These were sponsored TLDs rather than gTLDs).

Regards...jmcc

The problem with treating Google's opinion on anything to do with domain names is that you are effectively dealing with just how Google treats domain names because of the difficulty in precisely identifying the market the websites are targeting.

it's actually pretty simple.
google treats ccTLDs as gTLDs when people treat them that way.
from the GSC doc linked above:

Google treats some ccTLDs (such as .tv and .me) as gTLDs, as we've found that users and website owners frequently see these more generic than country-targeted.

I don't consider Google to be expert on domain names. The registries made the decisions to repurpose their ccTLDs not Google.

Regards...jmcc

some registries made the decision to allow their ccTLDs to be used outside of their geography.
this allowed people to make the decision to use this subset of ccTLDs for non-country-targeted purposes.
google is certainly an expert on how domain names are being used, and specifically how ccTLDs are being (mis)used.
google is merely acknowledging how people are repurposing the use of ccTLDs.

See the three categories of ccTLDs above? That's the reality. Some ccTLDs benefited by having a useful two character code (.TV etc) and decided to make money from it. It wasn't people repurposing the ccTLD. It was the registry. Many of these repurposed ccTLDs belong to small countries and they make more money from these repurposed ccTLDs than they would have done from purely local registrations. This is quite different from ccTLDs simply allowing foreign registrations.

Regards...jmcc

Going back--sort of--to the original question. Wouldn't it also depend on what kind of site it is? If it's a business, it is to the search engine's advantage to serve results from the searcher's geographic region. But if it's an informational site, it makes no earthly difference to the end user where the domain is physically located, so long as it's in a language the user knows (as indicated by the language of the original search).

... at least until you get into the realm of advertising, which is liable to be region-specific even if the site content isn't. And then if the search engine has a direct financial interest in the success of said advertising ...

But that's a different issue.

google is merely acknowledging how people are repurposing the use of ccTLDs.

They are not getting everything right though:

1. .gov and .mil are geographic
2. .eu and .asia are treated as generic, even though they are clearly targetted at certain countries. Not only is .eu officially a ccTLD but registrants must be entities or people within a political unit. If you are British, Swiss, Norwegian, Russian etc. you cannot register a .eu domain.
3. It also sounds as though geographical gTLDs as treated as generic, including things like city name domains.

If it's a business, it is to the search engine's advantage to serve results from the searcher's geographic region. But if it's an informational site, it makes no earthly difference to the end user where the domain is physically located, so long as it's in a language the user knows (as indicated by the language of the original search).

In my case, the sites are absolutely region-specific; each site targets a specific location.

But that wouldn't be likely to coincide with the regional tld.

For example, my site might target people that live in Gotham, USA. I could buy goth.am, but the .AM extension was originally intended for Armenia. So if Google would see it and push it to people in Armenia, while ignoring the people that live in the US, then it would be worthless for my purposes.

So while the discussion here is valuable to other people, it seems pretty clear that for my purposes I'm stuck with using .COM; anything else would just be a waste of money. At least, for now.

I don't consider Google to be expert on domain names.

be that as it may, for many or most webmasters it is important to know and act on how google treats domain names.
you can see from this thread that the list hasn't changed in at least 5 years:
Will ccTLD "domain hack" hurt rankings in other countries? .ne for USA [webmasterworld.com]

See the three categories of ccTLDs above?

there is technically no difference between category two and three.
the practical difference is how people and businesses use them.

Going back--sort of--to the original question.

indeed:

Do you think that society is at a point where that's a feasible business model? Or just a waste of money and energy, since anyone seeing an ad for webmast.er would automatically go to webmaster.com?

if your business model depends on google search traffic, you need to heed how google treats TLDs before picking the domain name upon which to build that brand/business.
(google's lack of expertise notwithstanding)
once again, if you are considering ccTLDs and you care about google search traffic, this document is your friend here:
Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites [developers.google.com]

Technically, there are often big differences between type 2 and type 3. Type 2 is a ccTLD registry that permits non-local/foreign registrations but the volume of foreign registrations is much smaller than the number of local registrations. Registry operations andthe majority of registrars are typically based in the ccTLD's country and most of the websites are focused on the ccTLD's country. Many of the foreign registrations are brand protection registrations or from businesses in adjacent countries selling into the ccTLD's market. In SEO terms, the focus is still on the ccTLD's country.

The registry operations for type 3 (repurposed ccTLD) are often outsourced (.TV outsourced to Verisign and recently Godaddy won the contract to operate the ccTLD) with registrar operations being handled by one fo the larger registry operators. This is because the registries for small countries may not be able to handle the registration volume or have the registrar network. The number of local registrations is often quite small compared to the number of foreign registrations. In SEO terms, the search engines treat the ccTLD as being a generic TLD rather than a ccTLD.

Concentrating purely on the SEO angle misses the bigger picture of registry operations and the necessary regulations. These are the IANA reports on the redelegations of .CO ccTLD.
[iana.org...] (Totally exclusively outsourced to CO Internet.)
[iana.org...] (Redelegated and partially outsourced.)

Registry operations are like plumbing. When everything works people don't notice but when they go wrong everything gets covered in crap. :)

Regards...jmcc

how registries are operated are irrelevant to the OP's question.
your "type 2" and "type 3" are both available for any potential business model.

The registry operations for type 3 (repurposed ccTLD) are often outsourced (.TV outsourced to Verisign and recently Godaddy won the contract to operate the ccTLD) with registrar operations being handled by one fo the larger registry operators. This is because the registries for small countries may not be able to handle the registration volume or have the registrar network. The number of local registrations is often quite small compared to the number of foreign registrations. In SEO terms, the search engines treat the ccTLD as being a generic TLD rather than a ccTLD.

regarding the OP's question, in fact Bing doesn't treat any ccTLDs as gTLDs.
How To Tell Bing Your Website's Country and Language [blogs.bing.com]:

3. Top-level domain

Out of the top level domain categories distinguished by the IANA, only the country code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) influence the document location. For an overview of the currently assigned ccTLDs, please visit IANA’s website at:
http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/

Top level domains other than ccTLDs, including .com, .net and .org, do not influence the document location.