Make a wholesale switch from Brand.com to .Brand will be expensive, and won’t give you many benefits.
News over the weekend of the Government of Quebec deciding to not change its domains over to .Quebec heightens the discussion on if it makes sense for brands to switch their web presence to a .brand.
If they want to do it, it’s going to be really expensive.
The Government of Quebec pegged the cost at over $10 million. Ultimately, I think it might be much more.
Keeping new TLDs out of it for a moment, consider the costs of switching to a new second level domain name. Here are some of the things you’ll need to do:
- Reprint millions of business cards
- Schedule a switch over on all future marketing materials to the new domain
- Because your old URLs are on lots of printed materials, email address books and stuck in people’s memory, you’ll need to forward them (and every email address) to the new one for years
- Make big changes in IT systems
- Spend months of SEO work preparing your site to move without a rankings hit
Businesses have done this when they felt they were getting a better domain name. It hasn’t been easy, though.
For example, when ServiceMagic switched to HomeAdvisor.com, it lost 20% of its lead volume.
NutsOnline.com experienced similar problems when it switched to Nuts.com.
Now, bring .brand new TLDs back into it.
In both of the above cases, you can easily argue that the company was at least upgrading to a better brand. Can you say the same if you change from Deloitte.com to .Deloitte?
I can answer definitively in the short term: no, it’s not an upgrade.
In the long run, only if new TLDs become widely accepted, there’s a possibility it will be an upgrade. But not now, not next year, not any time soon.
Rick says
A total minefield.
It will only take a few big horror stories to snuff any potential excitement around the new TLD domains.
Robbie says
Government changes are much more costly, and more in depth, as you are held accountable to a higher degree. Many health organizations it is vital to have the right website, and such for proper public education.
Funny it has been said all along, but it takes a big player for people to actually realize it.
Samit says
Even private companies that do a domain name change will find it almost as expensive as changing the brand.
Jothan says
There are certainly a variety of subtleties that make the transition different for each brand, to be fair. [shameless plug] I would encourage people to learn more at the upcoming NamesCon in Las Vegas in January.
Folks can hear in the podcast in the previous article about the NamesCon conference, but we use http://namescon.vegas for the primary URL when we give it out – yet we’re transitioning with ongoing use of the namescon.com domain name so that we do not lose search engine ranking, links, and other benefits from legacy use of the .COM domains.
Many and most people are careful and methodical about their transitioning so as to not disrupt or disconnect in the process of expanding.
If you look at large global brands like http://group.citic (I had not heard of CITIC prior to the new TLD round, but it is a massive conglomeration that would eb akin to Berkshire Hathaway according to a friend in China) who just concluded a test where they had redirected http://citic.com to http://limited.citic we could learn more about the impacts of transition.
Moving a brand.com to a new gTLD can be a large process, but they have a process underway to transition towards the company sites operating under .CITIC division by division.
There are many brands that are soon to reveal plans for their new TLD that will have some very impressive and transformational impacts. Authenticity, as well as a deliberate navigational choice are among the top reasons I am hearing.
For a lot of brands, they probably found the money to apply in a couch as far as overall budgets go, and the cost of a redesign that transforms a company’s supply chain? It can be more valuable strategically than ever to be the leader or fast follower, whatever the budget.
I am not suggesting that a new TLD is the difference going forward, but what are the real costs of standing on the sidelines? Ask Borders books this question.
Regarding .Quebec…
With respect to the government projects to transition to using .Quebec, I wonder if the cost is higher due to translation to two languages (Canada requires English and French versions of darn near everything) in the specific case of this large initiative?
From what I have been able to find out about the .Quebec transition, this was just a reduction of many made in a belt-tightening at the government level – there are still plans to deep link content and other uses of the TLD, and the TLD itself is not cancelled nor the required overall support of the Geographic TLD.
The .Quebec domain is launching in less than 24 hours, and they have some amazing pioneers like the Cirque du Soliel – which hopefully people can come see one of their many headline shows while in Las Vegas for the NamesCon in January.
Andrew Allemann says
Now that you mention namescon.vegas again, do you have concerns about transitioning fully to a domain that limits you to one geography? What if you have shows in other places in the future?
Joseph Peterson says
Hey, IT folks! There’s a lot of money to be made from assisting companies with domain migrations / changeovers. Quebec says $10 million just for its government websites. So, by extension, the total business involved in revamping online addresses (leaving out domain sales as such) must amount to billions.
That’s true whether we’re talking about a shift to some dot Brand or a more familiar domain upgrade — the kind that often follows a shortened name, a shift to .COM, or a rebrand.
Most potential domain buyers perceive the hassle of shifting to a new domain as a major obstacle. Is it? Doesn’t matter. That perception is an obstacle to all domain sales, and it accounts for many a failed sale or non-implementation after a sale.
I remember hinting at this when ElliotsBlog.com changed its name (a process that went quite smoothly, unless I’m mistaken). On this front, I haven’t seen any industry changes. There’s still a massive opportunity for registrars, smaller SEO firms, or enterprising domainers to package this domain migration service explicitly and market it in tandem with domains for sale.
Just follow the daily end-user domain purchases, and you’ll often find clients in need of such a changeover service. Think of it as an add-on for end-user domain sales in general. If you play your marketing cards right, domainers may even reference your service in their sales pitches when explaining how buyer concerns can be resolved.
$10 million just for Quebec. Imagine if Quebec had decided to go forward with .QUEBEC and had opened up the changeover process to public bidding. Your company — assuming you did have a large, well positioned company — might underbid that $10 million and still wind up with a single multi-million-dollar contract. I’m not sure whether Quebec would have outsourced the task to contractors, but large government contracts are tossed around all the time.
Even without Quebec, there will be a lot of domain changeovers year after year. If three aren’t, then there are no end users buying domains.
The lack of obvious services in this area can lead to bad publicity for the domain industry whenever an expensive domain purchase + site changeover leads to a dropoff in traffic. Hearing of such disastrous results, any buyer would balk at the prospect of a domain upgrade. It seems to me, this is essentially a choice (for the industry as a whole) between no domain sale or else a domain sale plus a follow-on contract.
Sam says
I wonder what you thought when the various government entities in the United States abandoned their .[state].us domains for .gov and .com domains. I remember it being easy to find a city government like ci.greensboro.nc.us, a county government like co.newhanover.nc.us, the state government at state.nc.us, or a school board at guilford.k12.nc.us. But these examples have since moved to greensboro-nc.gov, nhcgov.com, nc.gov, and gcsnc.com. When it came time to file my state taxes I used to type in dor.state.nc.us (which still works, yes), but a Google search shows their preferred dornc.com.
In the United States, governments and agencies were in a rush to find shorter domain names at the expense of easy discovery. Now Quebec has an opportunity to move to easy to remember domains.
Andrew Allemann says
Austin moved from one of those long ones to AustinTexas.gov a year or two ago. All sorts of links were broken. To this day, when search for info, I still and on missing pages.
I guess the difference with government is that you’re used to them providing poor service. They’re also the sole provider of many services, so if you’re frustrated with them you can’t go somewhere else.
Kassey says
CITIC is 中国中信集团 in Chinese. A search on 中国中信集团 in Google had group.citic rank above citic.com, but Baidu preferred citic.com and related sites and group.citic was nowhere to be found on page one. It appears that citic.com is more active with company news and update on the home page.
I just tested but clicking http://citic.com did not redirect to http://limited.citic.
Here’s an interesting observation made by Jennifer Wolfe in a post dated Jun 5, 2013 on MediaPost.com: “A number of brands have withdrawn from gTLD. Hilton, Heinz, etc. Why? Two likely reasons – costs, and difficulty in responding to ICANN questions. The ICANN questions involves explaining their gTLD strategies and financial models, but brands may not have determined their exact strategies or financial models at this point. I have talked with many Fortune 500 companies, and most of them don’t want to be the leader in this new trend. This gold rush of the Internet is a calculated risk worth taking — acquiring the real estate you want is critical. If everything changes and you have dropped out while competitors stayed in, you could lose market position.”
So, more evidence of .brand adoption is still needed, as far as I am concerned.
Sam says
Searching for “site:.citic” on Google also lists a few URLs at http://www.limited.citic, but that domain does not appear to online as of this moment…
gpmgroup says
ICANN’s implementation of .brands is fundamentally flawed, and only occurred because the whole process was pushed through by industry insiders who wanted to benefit from selling new gTLDs..
The real world is more complex than a single brand per company.
Proctor and Gamble won’t be able to have .pg but their situation is more complex because their brands are built around different products and $185,000 + $25,000 p.a. just doesn’t scale well….. .ace, .ariel, .bold, .bounce, .bounty, .cascade, .charmin, .cheer, .comet, …. and that’s just the a, b & c’s of brands for the household care division!
With over 80 brands they would will need to spend over $15,000,000 if they wish to apply for all their brands as new gTLDs and pay ICANN a further $2,000,000 every year going forward compared with the existing system cost of $800 p.a for staying with a .com for each brand.
New gTLDs are more restrictive too:
.ibm .dell no problem but what about Hewlett Packard? .hp is not possible.
And more confusing is your new domain to be yourname.co, .yourname.co.com, .yourname.com.co, yourname.com, yourname.ecom, yourname.company, yourname.corp?
.
How will your customers know which you have chosen?
Jaichim says
Andrew, why WOULD Quebec want to proceed with .Quebec after seeing the dismal performance of the existing inventory? The gtld idea was a bad one from day one and Schwartz was right on the mark in predicting their failure. The gtlds will soon be a memory and Quebec has better things to waste ten million dollars on. As they say in the movie, Frozen , “Let it go, let it go!”
Matt says
The SEO ramifications of moving to a .brand are much more significant than moving from one second-level domain to another. ServiceMagic and NutsOnline can transfer basically 100% of their domain authority to their new domain name, so the challenges are limited to getting the technical side right, which is a hassle but there’s plenty of precedent.
But when you move from Deloitte.com to .deloitte, presumably you’re then dividing your domain authority amongst a number of new second-level string: deloitte.com/jobs becomes jobs.deloitte, us.deloitte.com becomes us.deloitte, maybe deloitte.com/consulting becomes consulting.deloitte, and so on. Search engines aren’t currently set up to consider all strings on a .brand as the same website, so the effect will be dividing your old domain authority, which would be devastating to your rankings.
Every time someone links to you they would boost the authority of only one of your second-level strings. You’d basically be making SEO at least X times harder, where X is the number of new second-level strings you’re using on your .brand.
Search engines could fix this, but with a mixture of generic TLDs and brand TLDs it will be hard to do, especially since they already struggle with differentiating brand names from generics in their current algorithms.
Joseph Peterson says
You make a very significant point.
Kassey says
In the future, I guess you can just use a webmaster tool or some other channel to tell Google and other search engines that every string on .brand refers to the same website. How about that?
Joseph Peterson says
Trouble is, which brand wants to be the guinea pig for Google?
Dot Brands might all want to switch over after the companies ahead of them lead the charge and see their rankings get cut down by machine gun fire. By that point, it will be safe.
But which CEO wants his company to be first?
The future will catch up.
In the mean time, however, it seems like that first dot brand changeover could be very risky / problematic / stressful.
Collin says
I agree with most of your points, but I don’t see why they’d have to reprint millions of business cards. Could a brand just redirect the old .com to the new .brand and then gradually distribute the new business cards without worrying about the old ones? This also applies to the point about printed materials.
Emails would definitely be a pain, though.
Collin says
Couldn’t* a brand
Andrew Allemann says
In the short term, yes, as long as they forward everything (including email).