.Menu enters general availability with over 1,500 registrations.
The .menu domain name entered general availability yesterday and got over 1,500 new registrations shortly after GA started, according to zone file data. Here are some of the types of domain names that were registered.
Restaurant Brands
Most of the restaurant names I found were smaller restaurants. I didn’t find a lot of big restaurant brands.
There are some, of course: Yum Brands got PizzaHut.menu, TacoBell.menu, and KentuckyFriedChicken.menu/KFC.menu. McDonalds got McDonalds.menu.
TGI Fridays got TGIFridays.menu but it appears someone else registered Fridays.menu. Check that – TGIFridays does own the Fridays.menu domain. I accidentally looked up FridaysMenu.com, which is owned by someone else and shows ads for the restaurant.
Cybersquatting
When I did come across a brand I recognized, the domains were apparently cybersquatted more often than not.
An Austin area man registered Fuddruckers.menu and Hooters.menu.
Many other national brands were registered by people that don’t appear to be affiliated with the companies, including jambajuice.menu, jasonsdeli.commenu, papajohn.commenu, and tcby.menu.
A number of local Austin restaurants are apparent victims of cybersquatting, including rudysbbq.commenu, torchys.menu,
trudys.menu and uchi.menu.
Restaurant Terms
Restaurant and food category terms were popular.
Examples include LocalTakeout.menu, ChineseBuffet.menu and IndianRestaurant.menu.
Types of Food
All types of food were registered under .menu.
Examples include rib.menu, roastduck.menu, fishandchips.commenu and shrimp.menu.
Non-food
Then there are domains that seemingly don’t make sense with the food connotation of .menu. Then again, .menu has other connotations.
Soccer.menu and Baseball.menu might not make sense at first blush. But a menu of soccer options? I guess so.
Others include BodyBuilding.menu, CreditScore.menu and [email protected].
Techies registered menu domains for their “software menu” connotation. Dropdown.menu is an example.
Domo Sapiens says
All of this while:
5,444 Dot Info were registred
3,500 Dot Biz
3,300 Dot Biz
596 Dot Mobi
114 Dot Pro
39 Dot Recipes
26 Dot Singles
9 Dot Tattoo
9 Dot Computer
3 Dot Uno
Draw your own conclusions….
Furthermore,
Which would you say is better …more intuitive:
Italian.menu or Italian.Recipes….?
How many of those dot MENUs were defensive/brand registrations?
I frankly find anything else worthless.
Dot Chasing Rainbows….
Andrew Allemann says
If I were a restaurant I’d certainly look at one of the other food themed domains. I think .menu is rather limiting.
Joseph Peterson says
Somewhere or other — TheDomains? — I explained a bit about why I think .MENU could be a success with restaurants and consumers. If we saw widespread acceptance of the concept of navigating directly to a restaurant’s menu through typing in such a domain, then that would be a real boon for direct navigation and domains in general. And, I imagine, it could be convenient for restaurant goers.
But for this habit of direct navigation to .MENU to catch on, it would need to achieve a large critical mass of restaurants using domains in this way. Given the amount of cybersquatting we’re seeing on .MENU, that may never happen.
There are so many mom and pop local restaurants out there — businesses which are typically not very interested in domains — that they’re less likely to register a .MENU than one of their cybersquatting local customers. Maybe the borderline cybersquatters will be content to trade their domain for a free appetizer. If they walk into the restaurant and ask the waiter or hostess for some exorbitant amount, they’re likely to be met with blank stares. And they might even be banned from their favorite local eatery by an irate proprietor!
Ryan says
What are cyber squatters going to do with $40 .menu names? Put up fake menu’s, they will not gain much traffic from attempting to take traffic from a mom and pop’s brand, this is one of those extensions you skip over.
Domo Sapiens says
Make the: 3,300… Dot US (not Biz)
http://www.registrarstats.com/TLDDomainCounts.aspx
And someone corrected me on regards to Dot Uno stating the zone files are not updated there could be up to 135 to 150 registrations on the first day…
jZ says
this one seemed to have a lot of reserved names.
Ryan says
Yes, JZ was just going to say that, out of 100 names I checked only 2 came back available, even mid level terms donuts let thru, they had reserved. This is a niche targeted gtld, they have kept anything that comes to be close to generic back, and any Brand Name Rest. that wants a menu, can attempt to register one.
This is not an extension for the typical domain investment strategy.
Domo Sapiens says
@JPeterson:
That is never ever going to happen, No Savvy Marketing professional will ever suggest/recommend restaurants deviating from their established “working perfectly fine” URLs,,,
.MENU makes no sense
here comes: .address .location .reservations .recipes .foodtogo .hours etc etc
Why confuse your customer?
gpm group says
@JPeterson:
.menu is more targeted than .mobi but also fewer targets
excitemental says
more cyber squatters.. i wonder how many were actually registered by businesses who will develop on them?
Joseph Peterson says
@DomoSapiens,
I see .MENU as a special case. Menus are themselves searchable spaces. When we sit down at a restaurant, we browse menus just as we browse Google search results. So why not go to a .MENU to look for dishes and prices in the same way that people go to a Google.com to look for websites? The same thing cannot be said for most other extensions, since they are not pre-defined search spaces.
There are arguments in favor of skipping straight to the restaurant’s menu with a .MENU. I’m not suggesting that restaurants need to buy into those arguments. But some might. And if that practice became uniform, then it would make navigating the web (and menus) a bit more convenient.
Direct navigation (as opposed to Google search) is more efficient. But it needs to produce reliable results for that efficiency to be realized.
I’m not saying restaurants should brand themselves or build their website on .MENU. I’m only suggesting that using .MENU as a shortcut to a more readable menu — as opposed to a home page with store locations, ads, etc. — might be something people find appealing. It would also advance the cause of domains as such.
Will it happen? You say “No Savvy Marketing professional will ever” do so. But some people will do so. In that case, your prediction is sort of unfalsifiable, because anyone who defies your stricture will just not be “savvy” then.
Jonathan says
Most restaurants already have a section on their site for this. No point whatsoever in buying a .menu, just to have a menu. You’re suggesting a place gets, theirrestaurant.menu, when they already have theirrestaurant.com/menu ?
Joseph Peterson says
@Jonathan,
You mean like these?
KFC.com/menu
BurgerKing.com/menu
BaskinRobbins.com/menu
etc.
Those URLs don’t resolve to any menu, and they’re the first 3 that popped into my head. Meanwhile, if there were an established convention whereby .MENU domains led to the restaurant’s menu, then that would be an improvement over this status quo.
Most restaurant websites actually don’t have a browsable menu of the kind they’d hand you at the table. Even when menu items are found on their sites, they’re not necessarily the user-friendly, browsable lists of entrees you’d expect.
So if the registry were smart, they’d create templates for restaurants as an incentive for them to adopt such a shortcut.
And if consumers were trained to type in domains to get information, that would be a good thing. Sure beats Google!
That’s what I’m saying. Should restaurants do this? Maybe, maybe not. Will some restaurants try this? I think so. Will enough restaurants try this for the convention to catch on? I have no idea. Would the convention (if adopted) make .MENU viable? With templates, yes, I think so. Would that be good for consumers? Yes. Would it be good for direct navigation and the domain industry? Yes.
.MENU isn’t a necessarily an ideal alternative to a .COM branded site for a restaurant. But it may have the benefits I’ve outlined. It’s possible.
Jonathan says
It’s like you’re trying to invent reasons to buy for problems that don’t exist. For your example to be effective, you would need everybody on board, that’s not going to happen. I’ve never heard anybody say that finding a menu is a problem. For your BK example, there is a link to the menu in the upper left on the home page, very easy to find.
Andrew Allemann says
Rightside has created a service at One.menu to help restaurants get their menus online in a good format. There are a handful of competing services to this that don’t rely on a domain name.
Joseph Peterson says
Maybe this is a better way to say things:
With most TLDs it’s impossible for the TLD to ever become a reliable convention for navigating information. Even if a number of photographers use .photography, we won’t be able to anticipate their brand name or know for sure if they’re employing .PHOTOGRAPHY, .PHOTO, .COM, .NET, or something else. Plus, it’s too long to be a shortcut. So .PHOTOGRAPHY simply cannot become a convention for getting to photographers’ websites.
But it’s POSSIBLE for .MENU to become a standard convention for getting to restaurant menus. That’s because we generally know the name of the restaurant whose menu we’re seeking.
I don’t say this will happen. But it is possible in the case of .MENU.
In other words, we have the chance of direct type-in navigation becoming the NORM for accessing a certain kind of information online. Direct type-ins of a restaurant name + .MENU as an alternative to search engines.
That would be immensely significant.
Other TLDs mostly do not present that kind of possibility. That’s what I’m saying, and that’s what interests me here.
Ryan says
Other than brand protection, you can use a .com, or a restaurant if that is coming out, and work off that. The big guys will be forced to buy brand protection, and place a webpage up, for 99% of other small restaurants they could care less. Let’s see if this one even gets to 5K registrations by year 3.
Ryan says
I don’t think Joseph Peterson know himself what he is arguing, does he think the corner Greek restaurant is going to have a .com page, then a different domain for .menu, given they cannot match their .com, and their .menu domains, confuse their customers… this is seriously a comedy sketch. Is he Metal Tiger?
Rory says
Uhm, .recipes, .menu etc- registration cost is just too high for my taste. I don’t know if a small restaurant after weighing the pros and cons will buy into this. However with some smarts and creativity and the right name you could probably develop some website service for monetizing. only time will tell.
confer says
What Joseph is saying does have merit; and I agree that .menu is arguably one of the better new gTLD extensions that might lend itself to a “standard convention/platform” (like .tel) for restaurants to publish their menus. But, this sort of “standard convention/platform” idea should have been pushed much further IMO …
IF I had been in charge of the .menu launch, knowing that 10-15 closely related food/restaurant extensions were to come, I would have ensured some sort of unique ‘back-end’ application was co-launched with the .menu introduction. For example, most small and medium size restaurants (and arguably the majority of large restaurants too) rely SOLELY on in-person ordering or telephone orders for pick up and/or delivery. Except for a select few large restaurant chains, on-line ordering (for pick-up or delivery) is the exception.
Imagine if the .menu registry had partnered with a firm able to offer ‘order taking’ and ‘payment processing’ for telephone and/or online orders. Even if just launched initially in the US, all you would need to start is 1 central online/call ‘center’ to manage the process of collecting telephone and/or online orders, payment processing, customer service solutions, etc. Coupled with…
a) inexpensive technology (e.g. a tablet/station that relays the order & delivery address to the specific member restaurant); and/or
b) innovative apps (such as small GPS ‘pagers’ that each restaurant assigns to their delivery drivers; allowing all online orders to be ‘tracked’ in real time; forever eliminating the typical 30-min post order “where’s my food” customer call-backs); and
c) the ability to easily ‘scale’ the online/call center as required,
…and the introduction of .menu could have been a business in-and-of-itself, clearly differentiating it from its’ soon-to-be gTLD competitors.
It is surprising to me that a registry like .menu (in what will prove to be a highly competitive ‘restaurant/food’ name-space) would invest $350,000+ for the extension, yet NOT offer any differentiating technology or partnership programs to coincide with the launch of their extension. What is the .menu “unique selling point” (USP) vis-à-vis the other soon to come ‘restaurant/food’ extensions?
Perhaps the bigger question: Where is the “innovation” that should be coupled with all these thousands of new gTLD launches?
Steve
ChuckWagen says
That’s exactly what I wanted, a call center in Jakarta that handles 350,000 phone orders a day to get a pizza 5 minutes from my house.
confer says
Next time, try getting off your high-horse before you drive your ‘chuckwagen’ [sic] and horses through the contributory comments of others. That way, your otherwise legitimate comment might be better considered….
Domo Sapiens says
@Andrew:
One flower Spring doesn;t make
@J Peterson:
Would you suggest to Applebees.com to start using applebbes.menu? and totally abandon the existing easy to navigate perfectly good and best of all WELL KNOWN website>?
And if yes (even as a complement) …why?
seriously
Have you hear of the New COKE fiasco?
branddo says
Yes, indeed this TLD can be used for a restaurant wishing to forward their menu, which will be easier to find in the search engine such as for example Windys .menu