What domainers should think about as the new TLD launch approaches.
Yesterday I published the comments of seven domain experts on what they think new TLDs will mean for domainers. Today I’ve rounded up five more experts from various parts of the industry.
Bob Mountain
Senior Vice President, Business Development at NameMedia
The introduction of new TLDs is probably the biggest change to the domain name space since the browser. Over the next 2-3 years users will be presented with thousands of new domain extensions. Near term we believe this will cause a lot of confusion and there will be a retreat to the safety of exiting TLDs, mainly dot com. Long term this has the potential to dramatically expand the size of the market, and to a certain extent reset the market by providing attractive generic and geo alternatives to the existingname space. Afternic is launching an innovative new program to help registries manage their Premium New TLDs and we’re excited about the potential for both domain investors and end users. This is going to make our industry a very interesting place as the new TLDs play out.
Debra Domeyer
Chief Executive Officer, Oversee.net
The success of any given new TLD will depend on how aggressively the registry promotes it and how readily businesses and consumers adopt it. There is already a lot of new TLD competition, excitement, noise, and even confusion in the marketplace. My prediction is that a handful of new TLDs will emerge as winners. For domain investors, the challenge is predicting or tracking and quickly identifying new TLDs with strong promotion and adoption trends. For the new TLDs that do emerge as winners, our industry will certainly benefit from increased registration, parking and aftermarket revenues.
However, regardless of what happens with new TLDs, domain investors with premium domains in the top TLDs should not worry about declining value. Businesses will continue to look at these top TLDs as prime, coveted real estate. And direct navigation users will continue to use familiar, existing TLDs.
Tobias Flaitz
Chief Executive Officer, Sedo
Sedo is excited to see which gTLDs have been applied for, and how these will impact the domain market. Generally speaking, the success of any new gTLD will rely on its commercial relevance based on the marketing strategy and business model behind it. With a good foundation on this front, a new gTLD can capture public interest, become a go-to location for consumers, and result in an innovative opportunity. On the secondary market as a function of the primary market, only those gTLDs that have a highly visible presence during their primary registration period will have the potential to be successful. We’ve seen a great example of this with CO Internet, who have partnered closely with Sedo.
Juan Diego Calle
Founder and CEO, .CO Internet
I think domain investors will have to think about TLDs in a similar way to traditional domain investing. Will this name (TLD) appreciate in value? Does the industry/segment have strong/growing fundamentals? All that plus one additional (if not critical element): who’s running the TLD? Is the company behind it credible?
Michael Berkens
Domain investor, Right of the Dot, and TheDomains.com
People certainly can’t point to a single launch of one TLD in the past and say well .museum and .aero didn’t work so these new gTLD’s are doomed.
With the brands and the media companies coming into the right of the dot space nothing that has come before can be compared to what is to come.
I also think the Domainer community is downplaying the people that are coming into the space with tens of millions of dollars.
You’re talking about people like Bhavin and Div Turakhia who are unquestionably brilliant and successful, the Donuts guys, Minds + Machines, Demand Media.
The list goes on and on. Of course we can only talk about those who have come out in public, but they are exceptionally smart, highly successful people that are coming with huge checkbooks in hand and the volume of those types coming into the space should not be downplayed.
The effect on current domain holders in terms of current value is just a guess. A case could be made how current values will decrease in light of a huge new supply and choice while one can argue that all of the new choices will lead to consumers to default to what they know which is .com
CB says
It will be interesting to see whether any existing word.com owners try to prevent the launch of a matching .word extension. I’d be fairly annoyed if I owned sex.com and someone was trying to launch .sex
Can anyone say, “confusingly similar”?
Andrew Allemann says
@ CB – that’s actually the best thing in the world that could happen to you. Just ask the owners of xxx.com after .xxx came out.
There is at least one company trying to angle for the .tld equivalent of its sld — web.com going for .web.
A. Mitchell says
Where will the hip, young trendsetters go to brand themselves and their emerging companies? .Music is too commercial & one-dimensional.
Perhaps trendsetters will emphasize ccTLDs, which are deeply flawed IMO. For example, .IO is expensive and has too many jurisdictional and legal risks. I liked (past tense) .SO & .IM but they are undercapitalized and failed to achieve early marketing traction (like .CO achieved) because they never had the money or the brains that .CO enjoys.
The biggest SEO efforts will probably be made for .Brand walled-gardens that Apple, Facebook and Google will operate.
David Costello is right on the money, as usual, but we could be in for a surprise if a well-funded applicant makes a compelling marketing effort.
It
Domain Smell says
@ A. Mitchell ….. very interesting angle about protecting rights overseas.
Regarding the post topic, wait until enough companies experience the Overstock.com effect of leaking traffic to O.com from O.co, on these new TLDs, and then the word on the street quickly changes to a chorus about how all these companies are leaking traffic to the .com counterparts. You will see a mad rush back to .com or just buying .com and redirecting to the new TLD.
.COM owners are getting ready to make a killing the more that is spent on the new TLDs. The more they spend, them more we make on traffic leakage.
It’s a perfect storm, and I love it! Put me out in the high seas of cash !!! 🙂
MT says
Throughout your day do 2 things:
1) every website you visit, take note of the URL, the brand name, and ask yourself “how can this company move to a gTLD other than .brand” (assuming it was considering doing so)? Then ask “are any of these options truly better than .COM/their current ccTLD extension such that the benefit would “outweigh the costs and risks of re-branding”?
2) take a look at all the PHYSICAL items in your life/world that have .COM imprinted on them in some way. Books, toys, shirts, cups, mugs, bill boards, stickers/cars, bathroom writing, documents, papers, etc.
I think you’ll find that for the vast majority the answer is no- no compelling benefit to switch whatsoever unless you cough up the 185k for your own extension. And like @A. Mitchell noted above, running your own extension is no small task.
Rob says
it’s great to hear the views of all these experts in the industry, BUT you need to look at what their interests are in all of this. it is in their interests to promote new tlds because they could make substantial amounts of money from it.
what we need to hear is the views of end user buyers. will these new tlds suddenly make them go out and register x new domains on top of their existing ones? or would they register many more newtlds than the single or few .coms they would otherwise have bought? no. if they decide to get mycompany.newtld instead of mycompany.com then the $ that goes to newtld is taken away from .com. in fact, less $ will go into newtld than otherwise would have gone into .com.
the only substantially new business i can see being created is speculation from domain investors. ultimately the whole domain reseller market will be diluted because it will not suddenly create new/extra demand FROM END USERS for domains despite what the marketeers tell you – it will only take business away from .com/net.
i eagerly await my predicted catastrophe in newtlds because there is money to be made in chaos.
Paul says
Winners:ICANN,Registering cos,Aftermarket cos
Losers:General public that have to spend/waste more money
YKNot says
I am an avid reader of Mike BErkins, but think he is mistaken here. Specifically, I think you can tell a lot by the poor reception of .museum and .aero. Here’s the problem: there is absolutely nothing wrong with those tlds. They worked. They were easy to pronounce, easy to spell, represented significant lines of commerce and preliminary ICANN studies showed that they were in high demand.
Same with .Biz. Nothing was or is wrong with it. It can support your webpage just like a million dollar .com and will similarly do a great job with your loyal email account.
So what was wrong with .pro? Short, sweet, good word association, no? The answer is simply that it wasn’t .com. No other answer.
We are all talking about possible new exciting tlds, yet .cat has existed for quite a while and while I know of a lot of cat lovers, I don’t know of ANY .cat sites. Do you? Ya think.dog will do much better? Or .horse? Really?
Face it, Mike. The expansion idea is a bad one. It will cause lots of confusion and, as Rick Schwartz has eloquently pointed out, they will all leak traffic like crazy as we learned from the o.co cctld disaster of an experiment. Mike, you should like that cause you own a million .coms and you will be the recipient of the errant misdirected traffic, but don’t promote the gtlds for any other reason. They are a pandora’s box that never should have been opened.
All this whole fiasco is going to do is to raise the price and value of existing .coms because after the huge generic tld fail that seems obvious to occur (to me anyways), then what is the internet community going to do next? Sure, some trademark attorneys will like and promote the new tlds cause they will get rich in the process, but there is nothing of substance or value here that has not already been tried and failed before.
Andrew Allemann says
@ YKnot – I suspect the reason none of your cat loving friends own a .cat is because they don’t speak Catalan.
Rob says
@YKNot
i do hope you’re right about raising the price of .coms but my gut feeling is the opposite.
to summarize my above post more clearly – the money pool brought into domains by end users (which is the REAL value of the domain market) will be pretty much the same as before, it will just be carved up differently. i don’t think end users will suddenly buy twice as many domains.
the carve up will change over the years as tlds fight. i think .coms will drop first, then spike up a bit when people realize the newtlds are not as good as their hype, then back down and level off. but in the end some end users will remain in newtld land and that is $ lost forever from .coms.
YKNot says
@Rob: Did westward expansion into Oklahoma, Arizona and Nevada “hurt” the prices of property in downtown Manhattan? Nah.
Same thing here. I agree that there may be a few netizens who make the uneducated decision to base the foundation of their web business on an untested tld which very realistically can go under and leave them hanging, but that will not adversely impact the value of .com, the de facto oceanfront domain property.
In the meantime, I think two things will continue to happen: 1. the Fortune 500. which is responsible for 90% of all advertising, will continue to bombard the world with the .com tld and 2. those who do try a .abc will soon find themselves coming to the infamous “overture conclusion” after leaking buckets of traffic (ie, 61%) to their .com counterpart.
catalan man says
Chill. You don’t need to speak anything to get a domain, dude. Yes, that is what it standard for, but just as people like to pretend that .tv stands for television, .ws stands for website and .co for company, I see nothing stopping you from pretending that .cat is for cat lovers.