.Club is spending a lot to promote .Club. That’s good news for .Club domain registrants.
Last Thursday night .Club hosted a launch party at Tao Downtown in Manhattan featuring celebrity endorser 50 Cent.
I just barely made it to the party thanks to bad weather, a presidential visit to New York, and the plane running out of fuel (necessitating an unexpected stop in Baltimore). But I made it for the last half of the party and saw Fiddy, albeit from behind velvet ropes.
The .Club launch party was just the latest lavish marketing investment by .Club. It’s promoting the heck out of the .club domain any way it can, including a pricey promotion on top of GoDaddy’s home page and getting 50 Cent on board (even if he flubbed his talk at the party.)
We can argue all day whether or not this sort of investment is worth it. Some of the marketing spend probably is and some probably isn’t. I’m sure it took .co a few years to figure out what worked and what didn’t, and it will take new registries a while to figure it out as well.
What I know for sure is that this marketing helps registrants, including me. I registered two .club domains, making it one of three TLDs I’ve registered under so far. It’s great to see how much marketing .Club is putting behind the domain.
The GoDaddy home page promotion surely drove registrations. The launch party drove attention (and possibly some forthcoming media from Univision and Wall Street Journal, both of which were in attendance). The launch party also was a time for .Club to thank and encourage its channel partners, even if eNom’s Chris Sheridan didn’t manage to get a selfie with 50 Cent.
If I’m going to register new top level domain names, I really want to see the registry promoting the heck out of it. So far .Club is in rare company on this front.
[Disclosure: .Club paid for my trip to the party.]
The bar is really low, if this is supposedly all you’ve gotta do to be praised as great promotion.
In 2013, I enumerated 6 points that indicate seriousness on the part of the new gTLD Registries. One of them is of course local coverage on TV. I actually spent 4 months studying the impact last year, by monitoring vast TV coverage via my AcrossUnitedStates.com site. To make a long story short, there was nil coverage, ZERO!
I factored that in my conclusion.
So, it’s really a low bar to be praising anybody for a couple of gigs. If they are going to be serious, they need to drop their prices by 95%, and raise their campaign effort 1000%.
I guess you didn’t make it there in time to hear 50 mix up .club and .com.
I guess you didn’t read the story?
Missed that somehow. club seemed to pay for a number of people to attend this party. I guess its a drop in the bucket at the end of the day.
InDa.Com.Club …. AwwwwKWaaaaaaarD!
By the sound of it what’s most shocking is your plane ride.
It was painful. To top it off, on the way to the hotel my car was rear-ended.
Horrible! Hope that you were uninjured. Was there any upside to the trip?
Just a little love tap from a taxi. No biggie. Was just kind of funny after my long day.
Upside? Absolutely. The party was fun for the 90 minutes I was there, then there was a good after party and I got to connect with a lot of domain people I haven’t seen since DomainFest.
Who cares if 50 Cent got the name wrong. It will take time for users to get used to it.
In the late 1990’s a company spent millions promoting Rent.net and couldn’t get it off the ground because of the leakage to Rent.com. Nowadays, lots of successful sites are built on .net and .org.
When big brands start ending with .ibm, .sears, .walmart etc, the change will be cemented in users minds really quickly.
I don’t think people will gravitate toward gtld’s, they will gravitate toward internet address naming that is short, memorable and easy to grasp. RedWine.com is only better than Red.Wine until people start to think of .com as the old way of surfing the net. Give it 5 – 10 years.
@Williams,
I will treat your comment as a conversation between us below, you go first:
Williams: Who cares if 50 Cent got the name wrong. It will take time for users to get used to it.
Domenclature: You’re right on both scores. I don’t care, and it’ll take users time to get used to it.
Williams: In the late 1990′s a company spent millions promoting Rent.net and couldn’t[Sp] get it off the ground because of the leakage to Rent.com. Nowadays, lots of successful sites are built on .net and .org.
When big brands start ending with .ibm, .sears, .walmart etc, the change will be cemented in users minds really quickly.
Domenclature: I agree with your premises, and disagree with the conclusion. A few .net names do have a relatively successful businesses built on them, but they’re are generally considered a loser’s extension by this generation; the .Org has a purpose, need, want, desire, from the start, and therefore is the extension of choice for Organizations (large and small), and non-profits. However, your conclusion that .brands will produce change is simply faith, or voodoo. You have no proof for that.
Williams: I don’t think people will gravitate toward gtld’s, they will gravitate toward internet address naming that is short, memorable and easy to grasp. RedWine.com is only better than Red.Wine until people start to think of .com as the old way of surfing the net. Give it 5 – 10 years.
Domenclature: Revolutions take place in 24 hours on the internet. A couple of years ago, we saw Iranian students conduct theirs on Twitter. A good idea goes viral in seconds on Youtube, Facebook, Google, or Twitter.
Try this experiment: Advertise an exchange of your US $1000 for every US $100 on Twitter; I guarantee that it won’t take one week to catch on. It will make local, and international news. That is one way to tell you that the public doesn’t require anytime to know a good deal. They are quite savvy. They know what they don’t want to know.
Do you think if the public was consulted with a referendum on new gTLDs they would have voted YES or NO? Whatever your answer is what they will do with them because there is no mandate involved. You can’t force them to change.
I agree with Domenclature. The new G’s are dumb and I don’t think people will use them.