I think that these new tlds will find a way to make some people alot of money (and others lose alot of money), but I can’t guess how. Alot of time and money went into educating the public to go to .com by default. Is John Q Internet User going to be sitting around and think to himself I want car insurance, then type in “geico.insurance”, and then after he is done think, I want some Pizza, and go to dominoes.pizza? seems like a long shot to me. Too many combinations of too many things.

I’ve always thought there were 2 kinds of direct navigation users 1: guessing game, and 2: by accident.

The #1 guys are like me, just guessing a domain name for a product they are looking for, on the assumption that they will find what they want. For example I needed a particular router bit last year, and rather than searching I just guessed at RouterBits.com. It turned out to be a good guess, and they had exactly what I needed. I don’t know why I didn’t search google for router bits, I just did it this way for whatever reason.

The #2 guys are using direct navigation by accident. These are typically the people I see as my customer in my IT Consulting business. They just plain don’t know how to use the internet (most people are like this IMHO, and in my experience). They will type a domain name into any input entry box they can find to try to find what they are looking for. Typically I see them enter domain names into a search box (thus giving us ovt w/ ext score), but if there eye catches the url bar first they will type it there. Its hit or miss.

So what does this have to do with all these new .tlds? Think about guessing game people,endless tlds are going to make the guessing game obsolete. Too many things to guess, and what makes one domain more authoratative on a product than another? And what about the by accident people? Well these guys are pretty much capable of anything, so who knows, but all I see is best case new tlds spreading the pool of accidental type-ins across a much broader space, but probably heavily weighted towards .com for years to com.

It would cost alot of advertising dollars for ebay to buy .ebay and train everyone else to use that instead. Will they see an ROI on their initial $185k investment, plus the $75k per year to keep it rolling, plus the overhead to train the public to go to .ebay instead? Only 1 way to find out.

For sure though, there will be a clever and practical use for new .tlds, and some people will benefit. I think .xxx can’t lose. I think it would take about 5 minutes and no marketing to train the internet porn consuming world to type whatever they want .xxx for faster results. I can’t really think of any other extensions that have that kind of a chance though. Can you?

I could also see something like .blog having modest success.

For example, .ins may be used so insurance agents can have theirname.ins or maybe teachers can have their own website at theirname.teacher. Same for .law, .realtor etc.

Still, there will always be the strong subconscious urge to type in theirname.teacher.com

So, maybe a governing insurance group, teachers organization, law group or realtor organization would have a strong incentive to go for their own extension.

Also, might not be a bad bet for the person who owns the teacher.com, the law.com, ins.com etc.

That way the generic domain owner can have the whole package.