Here’s how new TLD applicants decided which strings to apply for.
Some new top level domain applicants picked one or two domains to apply for. Others applied for dozens.
It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall when these companies debated about which ones to apply for. From talking to many applicants, I’ve discovered a number of approaches they took to creating and finalizing their list.
The data junkie
I crunched existing domain name, search, and marketing data to come up with the most promising top level domain strings. Emotion and intuition were out of the game. It was pure numbers.
The game theory strategist
I’ve got my list of possible strings, but I’m going to take into consideration what I think other applicants are going to do. Sure, .app is my top pick, but what if 13 other people apply for it? (They did.) I’m going to pick the strings that I think will have the most potential but weight that against how much competition they’ll face.
The personal experience
I got a PhD in agriculture, and I’m a chicken farmer, and I know there are a lot of chicken farmers out there who will register domains. So I’m going to apply for .chicken. Others may not see this as a big market opportunity, but I know the chicken industry.
The WTF guy
I’m applying for so many strings that I don’t need to worry about one or two oddballs. So I’ll apply for something really out there, like .WTF.
.CLUB was our only application. So after reading this article I thought about why we chose that one name. Ultimately, we believed it to be one of the best, and based on recent the pre-registration data we appear to be right. We also believed it was under the radar. There were too many articles about .law, .bank, .shop, .web. Few about .CLUB at that time. There are millions of clubs and groups around the world, online and offline, that could use a great domain yet few seemed to care.
Enter myself and a few others who gambled it all on one great name. In hindsight if had I known what I was facing in advance (the competition from the likes of Donuts/Google/Amazon), the convoluted ICANN process, and the overreaching GAC I’d probably be crazy to try to get a name like .CLUB.
If there was one category your forgot it was the simply the “damn lucky guy!”
Colin Campbell
CEO, .CLUB Domains, LLC
Good info! Thanks. I guess those coming from domaining might have just followed the money, by using data mining to identify keyword associated with biggest amount of money.
The .موقع (.site in Arabic) IDN gTLD was applied by a firm in Saudi Arabia, and it was the only string they applied for. In Arabic, when one wants to announce a website URL, they would say “Go to our site (موقع) at http://www...”, and so that was where the idea came from.
I guess it is easier to find good names as IDN TLDs vs. ASCII TLD names. And then comes the better part where the number of IDNs contending for the same market is relatively low.
Fahd A. Batayneh
Executive Director
.موقع IDN gTLD Registry