radioinfo is now part of the world wide group of radio related businesses to have secured a dot radio domain name.
People interested in radio can now find us at www.radioinfo.radio, as well as the usual place at www.radioinfo.com.au.
Why is this important?
Because many people search on specific top level domains to narrow their field of interest. Radio people are pretty savvy in the ways of the internet and we encouraged radio stations to be part of the Dot Radio domain name movement.
The advent of smart speakers will also make the domain name more important than originally thought. The new devices, powered by search engines and artificial intelligence, will be able to find stations more easily if they sit in the Dot Radio domain.
We wanted to put our money where our mouth is, so we applied for a .radio domain ourselves.
The process was handled through the EBU, which checked the bonafides of anyone applying for one of the industry specific domain names. We found it very smooth.
Once we had the right to use our Dot Radio domain, we then needed to point the DNS entry to our current website, so that anyone who searched on that domain would end up at this site. The process took our IT guy less than half an hour. “It required setting the DNS servers for the new domain and then setting up a redirect on the server from that domain to the radioinfo site.”
If you managed to get one of the prized .radio top level domains, let us know and tell us whether the process was easy or not.
Some who managed to get the domain and have already activated it include: the next.radio conference, German stations WDR.radio and Antenne.radio, dance stations deep.radio and gone.radio, French station woot.radio, Michigan country music station WWBR.radio, US Christian stations WCIC.radio and Victory.radio, radar.radio, Irish station sunshine.radio, UK Community station Winchester.radio, and others.
See details of the domain name process here and here in our previous reports.
Well done, Radioinfo!
Here are some additional arguements for .radio:
The relationship between better ranking and the new top-level domains was proved by a study of Searchmetrics for Berlin-domains. Websites with Berlin-Domains frequently place better than websites with .de domains and .com domains in regional searches with Google. The result of the study by Searchmetrics can be summarized as follows:
"42% of searches show that .berlin domains rank better locally ."
The study of total sites in Houston shows that the results by Searchmetrics can be generalized to all new top level domains, including the new Radio-Domains: It was proved that Google uses the domain endings of the New Top Level Domains as a key element for the assessment of domains. Total sites draws as a conclusion:
"It is clear that the new top-level domains improve the ranking in search engines."
Hans-Peter Oswald
http://www.domainregistry.de/radio-domain.html