Political new top level domain names are not getting much attention.
With all of the news recently about presidential candidates not registering relevant domain names, you’d think political new top level domain names would see a boost. Yet, they continue to struggle.
Consider Rightside’s .democrat and .republican. The former has about 1,300 registrations and the latter just 800.
.Vote also has fewer than 1,000 names in the zone file (and .voto is about 250) despite the registry striking deals with states.
.GOP has about 3,000, but it’s being offered by a party itself.
If there ever were an example of lack of awareness in new TLDs, I’d say this is it. I doubt many of the managers for these politicians have any idea these names are out there.
I checked some of the candidates names in these extensions. Someone had already snapped up the big ones in .democrat and .republican. Afilias seems to have registry reserved popular candidate names in .Vote, likely with a goal of getting them to use them. (Which is pretty smart.)
Perhaps politicians are just throwing in the towel. Between first names, last names, name2016…it’s hard to cover all your bases.
Spencer says
.com is all that matters. everything else is a big YYYYYYYYAAAAWWWWN.
Ivan Rasskazov says
The public is used to .com domain consumption as a matter of habit. In order to be aware of newer TLDs, they will either have to see them used in real life or publicized in the media. Actually developing the sites would help and that is easier with some nTLDs than others.
KC says
Just look at how .com has evolved from an extension meant for “US” and “Commerce” to now “US” +”rest of the world” and “Commerce”+”the rest”.
.com is now firmly established as the extension for politics. This is not a US-only phenomenon. In the UK, Yvette Cooper has registered YvetteCooper.com and YvetteForLeader.com for her campaign. This trend will continue in democratic countries around the world.
Snoopy says
I think they would be very cautious about using a new tld. Last thing they want is people landing up on the wrong site or not being able to figure out the domain.
Robbie says
Nobody is using .us how much more clear could that extension be… I see people offering their gtlds for pennies on the dollar, no takers
KC says
Both .us and .com started in 1985. Unfortunately, .us was restricted (e.g. joesbakery.san-francisco.ca.us vs joesbakery.com) so .com won the race. 30 years later now .com has 120m registrations but .us less than 2m. It’s now very difficult to remove the momentum .com is enjoying.