The web site hosted on the domain Nepal.com is witnessing an apparent spike in type-in traffic, after a devastating earthquake flattened large areas of Nepal; thousands of lives were lost.
It’s times such as this that one expects the matching country .com to be an official source of information, provided by the Nepalese government.
Nepal.com is privately owned, and as such its owners motivation to turn the front page into a portal dedicated to Nepal relief is rather limited.
At Nepal.com the footer information states that it’s part of a cluster of geo-domains owned by NewMedia Holdings. Domain assets include Algeria.com, Morocco.com, Bangladesh.com and others.
There are two pieces of news on the gazette style portal, at Nepal.com, pointing visitors to Facebook.
Still, the enormous importance of a .com domain isn’t effectively utilized in this case.
Nepal.com displays a random array of Google advertising, instead of engaging visitors with custom-made, call to action graphics that point to information for Nepalese people relief. Most people expect a country name .com to be ‘owned’ by the respective country and operated by its government, in order to bear the ‘official web site’ mark at the very top.
