Yes people here are still going for .com
The awareness will increase and more people will be getting their business online with the Indian TLD.
Out of that huge numbers maybe a large part would have been registered by domainers and other companies who want to protect their trademark name.
Don't know maybe it is my city that is not so aware. But whenever I see people only think about .com and .net at the most. Other then that there is no internet existing for them. This I am saying for the normal people who are surfing web from homes and cyber cafes in free time.
Other majority of traffic is going at the famous places and just hanging in there for years. Lets say like orkut and friendster. You won't believe me but I have some friends who are doing diploma in computer engineering and are shocked to know that, this new tld's do exist. Other bunch is sitting on yahoo chat.
Some
Alexa data
Google, ebay and msn are already redirecting the users to co.in so maybe that is the reason.
Other then that there is not much awareness. Not even 5 .co.in or .in tld in top 100.
Well I haven't made any investment in this tld's. Not a single domain name. I maybe losing an opportunity but then I am not seeing that much growth here locally.
There was some hype about it in past also. But at that time also I ignored it as most of the advertisers are looking for US traffic and by the time advertisers will look for Indian traffic I would have retired.
Yes the 3 letter and other investments can be made though but I can still say that the buyers of them will not be indians as they won't care if it is a 3 letter domain name or has nice branding to it or not.
Sometimes when I see TV commercials for really nice companies they do show their website address. I don't want to make comments on it but you can imagine how it would feel to see a domain name with one hypen 2 keywords and one number in it. Moreover this is brandable. It is not associated with anything. I was thinking that I have 1000 times better domains then this. Why are they using this kind of names. They are spending fortunes in Commercials. They could have atleast spent a little for getting a good domain. Or atleast thought for 30 mins more and spent a little time in the registrar's site looking for some good ones.
Thanks.