A local medical group uses a .clinic domain.
I was driving home from the office yesterday when I saw a huge banner on the side of an Austin Regional Clinic building. I did a double take when I noticed this domain name: ARC.clinic.
For the most part, I think this is a good use of a new top level domain name:
1. The group’s official website is AustinRegionalClinic.com, which is pretty long to put on one line in a banner like this. (ARC.clinic forwards to the longer domain.)
2. The banner includes www., impressing on people that it’s a domain name. Note that it also uses a large font for the .clinic TLD; traditionally you might see the .com in a smaller type.
3. ARC.com is owned by another company. Although that other company just forwards it, it might not be for sale at a price that will work for Austin Regional Clinic.
The one downside I see is that the group doesn’t also own ARCClinic.com and ARClinic.com. I imagine some people who see the .clinic domain name will type in ARCClinic.com instead. It’s worth noting that these .com domains would also be just as short in an ad, since they wouldn’t need to include www to show they are web addresses.
Joseph Peterson says
You raise 2 good points that haven’t been discussed much:
(1) “www.” can clarify that an nTLD domain is, in fact, a domain.
but
(2) That extra “www.” occupies as much space as the “.com” eliminated by the nTLD.
Sam says
New TLDs are spreading. On vacation in the little town of Frankfor, Michigan, earlier this week, I saw a small yard sign encouraging passersby to learn about “flyboarding” (appears to be like kitesurfing). Their domain was stated simply as “flyboarding.today”, no “www.” or “http://”. I wonder how many people would actually realize it’s a web address without those prefixes…