For the record, I am not against new TLDs if there is a legitimate need for them and not as a strategy to cover ICANN’s recent stock market losses. One thing that will be redefined here is the meaning of a successful TLD. I doubt that any of these TLDs will have over a thousand sites developed (and I don’t mean mini-sites) in the next five years. What you will have is a handful of mega-sites on each TLD promoted to the max by people like Puck. In addition, you will have a tsunami of domain speculators gobble up all of the generics with the best held back for an auction. The outcome? Some of these TLDs will turn a profit and in that regard they will be considered successful. However, the vast majority of these domain speculators are going to get burned when they try to resell and future TLD releases will be considered with the same affection as a tech IPO in mid-2000.

I’ve heard that ICANN is going to release a walloping 500 TLDs in the first year. My prediction? DotCom and ccTLDs will come out ahead, dotNet and dotOrg will hold steady and everything else will be a needle in a haystack.

Let the games begin.

Clearly, auctioning/selling whatever.food to the 300k + usual keyword speculators will make money. That is no novel concept. (And whether or not that model adds tangible value to the Internet in general is an entirely different question.). So you are saying he has no real business concept behind the .food idea, just selling names. We already knew that. And I saw the video, it provides no rationale for .food whatsoever! In fact, that content does not need a .food registry to get that message across at all, the same could be accomplished on YouTube, food.com, etc, you name it.

Pushing these .whatevers without any logic (but just shameless celebrity marketing) at all is exactly how ICANN describes “demand”. Its “demand” to make money selling names to speculators, there is no true market demand for business applications for any of these extensions. Its like the condo craze but now its .whatever registries/their domains on the web. There was no demand for all those condos and there is no demand for domains under these wild extensions, just speculative hype in both cases. Its shameful ICANN tries to justify the extentions and now we have celebrity chefs knifing their way into the racket.

But if just selling names is Wolfie’s idea, he can do that on any .whatever name, there is no need to think so small with .food, .wine, etc., especially if its just to sell domain names. What would he care? So now its painfully obvious Puck will just be lending his name (by leveraging credibiity with food) with a possible % share in .food or .wine funding to pump up the hype for sales and he will get some % share of sales. Again, its nothing new, in Wolfie’s case he does it for overpriced cookware already, so why the heck not in domain names? Same scam.

Wolfgang Puck has posted video on his .food application and his thoughts behind it.

http://www.dotfoodtld.com/video/

Yes and No.

Lets say the American Bar Association get behind a .law for example and then promotes it to its millions of members.

And when I say promote they do it properly, hype it up starting like now, get the interest and demand growing, make it sound like the future of the legal profession on the internet and then roll it out using a .me auction formula.

Not so hard to do.

Now for other extensions like say .music, I agree that’s going to be a harder go.

So again out of hundreds of extension not all will fail, and will become profit centers for the registry.

You have to think of this from the other side.

Buying food.com or wine.com, is entirely different than buying the extension.

What Wolfgang is trying to do is go into the registry business.

That is different than buying food.com and developing and operating a site.

As a registry, it can be profitable without the extension being regarded as a huge “hit” from the user side.

How, you do just like .me did.

All premium locations go to auction.

.me made $2M just on the auctions on those domains which had 2 or more backorders on them, plus all of the money they have made from domain auctions at TRAFFIC, Sedo and now NJ, with more to come, plus the registration fees on 250K domains.

So I agree With Brian’s comment above, if there are hundreds of extensions, many will fail but some will become profitable enterprises to the registry.