@Mike…I too believe that this will be rolled out continent wide by Google…and as you point out, they’re already opening up that curtain…

Up here in Cancuk land…our most current numbers show that after almost five ful months of use – is that we’ve had 7,000 new .ca domains created and 6,000 sites created as a result of that initiative!

All of which, far as I’m concerned is a great thing indeed….specially when comScore reports that 43% of ALL businesses are NOT online…

🙂

Jim

Hey Mike,

Great post. Of course I do get the Google updates directly but you always drill down to the good stuff.

Do you think I could make some money grabbing up all these domains with hyphens? 😉

Just kidding

The timing works well with their new (old) Adwords Express. I wonder if G will try and marry the two together when they roll out their free sites everywhere else.

@Mike….yeah, should’a commented that the #’s I get are from my own contact at google Toronto, and as a supporter of same (my own link is here on the gybo site – http://www.gybo.ca/supporters – we get to ask what the most recent numbers are….

looking good, Canucks!

🙂

Jim

@Jim
Thanks for the follow up. Any chance you could ferret out which business categories are signing up in what %’s?

@Miriam
I agree that a 3 page site is not likely to valuable unless they really, really focus their message on a very few products…it would be an interesting experiment to see how far we could take a 3 pager…

@Mike, once again a great post!

Since when does Google give any weight to “free” websites that could be gone tomorrow?

As mentioned in a comment above, it does have the possibility of creating a lot of low hanging fruit for some other web companies to target. Hopefully, Google’s efforts will help engage more smaller SMBs with the Internet.

But we could all be wrong too, maybe Google got all those domain names to boost up their own link popularity. 🙂

@Phil

Good question about Sites. It certainly falls into a nether land where even Google doesn’t seem to have great confidence in the quality of the content.

I have no idea how it fits into Google’s long term plans. Certainly as a place to generate content is might have value to them . I just did a site:sites.google.com and it showed 25,600,000 results. I can’t imagine that is a product that generates ad sales.

Hi, interesting information, that Google wants do business also as web hosting provider. The question is, if a a site benefits by ranking, if they are hosted an a google server or not.

Greetings from Hamburg, Germany.

This whole thing is a scam. When you get a site its free for the first year! After that they are going to charge you for the domain and the hosting. Intuit and Google are going to take over a huge market share of webhosting. Intuit is not even a good host. You don’t get a cpanel or anything. When they do so google is going to grow and be able to send you more advertisements. They will have all of the websites on their server and track who uses that small business and where. Then send more ads about that subject to that area. I would get a local website designer because thats who this is going to end up hurting in the end because Google already has so much power. Why should we give them more power they already control a huge amount of the web. Search, Gmail, Youtube, Bloggspot, Google Stocks, Google news, Google Chrome, Google Checkout, Google Books, Google Maps, Google Plus. They already control a huge amount of webspace. How much do you want them to control your life? Think about it on every service you use with them they track your information for 8 months! They can tell a lot more about you than you think they can. I’m not saying not to use Google. What i am saying is that they are to powerful on the internet. Google is a monopoly.They should be split up into multiple companies like AT&t was in 1984. This would effectively help smaller web companies like webhostingpad.com or gatorhost.com keep their presence in the web. Google could easily but both of them out of business.