Old school advertising to promote the .la domain name.
GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving tweeted a photo of a .LA billboard in Los Angeles yesterday (see photo).
As more “local” domains come to the internet, this type of targeted offline advertising will become more common.
GoDaddy already does a lot of TV and promotional advertising and is probably good and tracking results from campaigns like these billboards.
I had someone in Los Angeles check a couple times to see if they were geotargeted with promotions for .la when they visited GoDaddy.com, and they didn’t see anything specific to .la on the home page. That said, the company may be testing this sort of targeting on a limited number of users (if not now, then in the future).
The biggest lift for .city top level domains may be when the city is actually behind them. Witness .nyc. A simple tweet from Mayor Bloomberg about .nyc set off a flurry of media coverage a couple weeks ago.
.LA is just the domain name for Laos being rebranded, so it doesn’t have city involvement.
City involvement is sure to increase cost, and in fact in nyc an annual tax of 1.5% has been announced. This to me says ongoing control by the city will likely prevail.
.la users buy the domain, and can just run with it like a .com
OK so what will the .la’s sell for?
If we look at accidentattorney.com Estibot (under) states the value as $112,000 This domain offers untargeted search in general, whereas the same domain in the .la version would be considered highly targeted to a LosAngeles Law firm.
So how should these values compare?
What do you think?
Here comes the “new” tld money.
Let’s see if .travel, .pro, .biz etc are going to reintroduce. Great if they do. I just hope the end users are buying.
I hope .la gets some legs. If not, why should .nyc get legs?
Sure they are different on the back end but the same to the end user.
A business-killing mistake indeed for anyone foolish — or naive — enough to attempt to rely on a communist-country, could-grab-your-domain-at-any-time tld.
No amount of billboards or other advertising can ever change that.
Ever.
I won’t be surprised to see GD re-introducing .mobi as THE platform for mobile app developers. Also, I see that in the picture “.com” is no longer part of GD’s logo.