Restrictions mean little exposure for .boat and .yachts.
Publishing company Dominion Enterprises launched the .boats and .yachts top level domain names last week.
Odds are you didn’t hear about the launch. The reason is simple: these are restricted domain names.
You must have a tie to the marine world in order to register a .boats or .yachts domain name. Registrations are held until this connection can be verified.
Domain name registrars hate this kind of verification. As a result, only four domain name registrars currently offer these two domain names, according to the domains.boats site.
Is this a bad business decision for Dominion? Maybe, but you need to consider its business to understand why it took this approach.
The company owns a number of marine publications, including Boats.com. Locking up .Boats may have been somewhat defensive.
This also allows the company to sell domains as an add-on service to the people who list boats and yachts for sale on its sites, including YachtWorld.com and BoatTrader.com.
It could still do this if the domains weren’t restricted, but I suspect it’s trying to control the domain’s usage as much as possible.
If the goal is to treat the domains as a profit center, then the company should have gone with a more open model, perhaps with a high starting price and premium pricing for the better domains. If it’s merely to protect and improve its brands in the marine space, then its closed approach might be justified.
M. Menius says
Andrew, I think you nailed it. Locking up .boats and .yachts gives them total control of what will eventually become the most powerful internet space possible related to those industries. When you consider the comprehensive nature of those two tld’s in particular, there is no close second tld string that could challenge them. Quite a strategic decision.
BetTheLot says
They will be selling them to anyone for under $10 in 5 years. As we have seen with .pro and others that launch early and had first out the gate advantage.
Claire Read - Dominion Marine Media, Business Development Director says
Dominion is at the heart of the marine community, which does make us different from traditional registry operators, registrars and resellers. This does, however, mean that we are uniquely placed to sensitively consider the domain opportunity, specifically regarding the impact and dynamics across the whole marine industry.
There is a huge opportunity to use these new domain extensions to revolutionize the way digital content is organized by category on the internet, and that’s what we are striving to do.
By creating a gated community of registrants, where only genuine recreational boating organizations and individuals can be part of the space, consumers will be able to find the content they are looking for online in both .yachts and .boats more quickly and easily from credible sources, which will benefit us all