An Article today in TechCrunch.com talks, about Amazon rolling out its ‘Pages” project and how that that might be how at least some of the new gTLD’s they applied for will be used by the company.
“The company is quietly pushing a service called Amazon Pages, which lets companies set up their own pages on Amazon.com as “custom destinations,” complete with www.amazon.com/brandname URLs and dynamic designs with large photos and social media links. ”
“Along with this, it is also offering Amazon Posts for companies to market themselves across Amazon and Facebook, and Amazon Analytics to measure how well all of the above is working.””
“The bigger effort around pages, meanwhile, gives Amazon a significant leg up in its positioning brands and smaller businesses that might potentially look to Amazon as a way of running their full online operation, in place of their own standalone websites. The fact that there are URLs involved here also gives another intriguing twist to the news from many months ago about Amazon filing for dozens of generic new TLD names like “.buy”, “.group”, “.room” and “.shop”.
Although Amazon’s new gTLD applications were “closed” most understood that to mean that none of the domains under the TLD’s would be available to be registered by third parties.
However, according to this article, it seems that at least some of the TLD’s Amazon applied for will be more “controlled” than closed, meaning they will be available to third parties to be registered but possibly restricted as to use for those wanting to do business with Amazon or sell their products.
As we have said before, you will see some very interesting new uses for domain names in the new gTLD program.
Many new gTLD domains of them will be bundled or used in conjunctions with other products in ways you haven’t seen domain sold before.
Many of these domain name will make perfect marketing jingles. So why not?
But Amazon needs to get through the walls of ICANN first.
I believe they have. Even without those gtlds…the play is a major one. Only problem is that darn GoDaddy looking template that will make your brand seem it’s from the dark ages.
I had expected that Amazon might employ its closed gTLDs in this manner.
Those participating retailers will not have the normal rights of domain registrants but will rather be indentured registrants, subject to Amazon’s whims as to how they may use their domains and how long they can manage them. That is, they will be even more subject to Amazon’s control than independent merchants are now.
If anyone wants an idea as to how well these extensions will do,
generally speaking, then their best reference point is to look at
how well other TLDs THAT MEAN SOMETHING have done.
For example, TLDs such as .info, .tv, .me.. and perhaps a few others.
And as for ‘domainers’, who think this will be the next domain name
‘gold rush’, i’d offer a word of caution. These names may well not have
the same kind of registration right that you get with currently existing
gTLDs…
Neither Google or Amazon would care about the relative small amount of money a registry earns. The TLD rush could be similar to bandwidth auctions – large companies buying speculatively for the future and to keep competitors out.
It is possible that very few of the better TLDs may be released to the public at all.