Raising awareness about new TLDs on a microscopic budget.
If you’re about to usher in what Peter Dengate Thrush calls “the biggest change I think we have seen on the Internet”, how much would you spend to raise awareness of a limited application window to take advantage of that change?
Let’s also say applicants have to pay $185,000 and you expect $100 million in application fees.
Surely you’d plan to spend a good chunk of change on advertising.
Or not.
As Kevin Murphy points out today, ICANN plans to award a contract to an ad agency for a limited budget of only $750,000 to promote the new TLD program.
I agree with him that most of the awareness will come from non-advertising, such as press articles.
But still, this just doesn’t make sense to me.
This is a big change. It concerns me that ICANN is reserving about 40x as much for legal issues as it is for advertising.
JS says
Add to the equation that ICANN is supposed to advertise the program in the 6 official UN languages.
Rob says
The best advertising ICANN will get will be from the registrants themselves, when they put the new TLDs in their own media campaigns – big and small. But it will be fragmented exposure at best.