WSJ: There Real End Users Looks Forward To Moving Their URL To A New gTLD

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The Wall Street Journal has become the another major publication to publish a story about the launch of the new gTLD program and has actually talked to some real people, small business owners who are looking forward to registering a new gTLD to replace their longer .com

The Story is entitled “Sell Bike’s? There’s a Web Domain For That”

“The World Wide Web is about to get a lot wider.

 Starting Jan. 29, the first of hundreds of new top-level Web domains—the suffixes that appear at the end of website addresses like .com and .net—will become available for the first time in more than a decade.”

The author of the story goes on to chat with some real end users who not only know about the New G’s (as Mr Schilling calls them), but are actually moving their URL from a longer .com to a short New G.

“”It’s a marketing opportunity,” says Avery Pack of Dania Beach, Fla., who hopes to get a Web address ending in .bike, such as custom.bike”

“Mr. Pack has several ideas for using the new domain, such as to create a website for customers to post photos, video and other content about the wheels they buy from his business”

“Don Teague of Coppell, Texas, has his sights set on a .christmas address for his seven-year-old business, Synchronized Christmas Inc., which specializes in setting up decorative light displays. He believes the Web address synchronized.christmas is more memorable than his company’s current one, synchronizedchristmas.com.” Plus, .christmas “just sounds cool,” he adds.”

Of course WSJ also chatted with businesses that has no plans to start from scratch like  “Jay Sofer, founder of a small locksmith service in New York, says he’s spent tens of thousands of dollars to advertise Lockbustersnyc.com, since he started the business in 2008. Letting existing and potential customers know about a new address for his company—no matter how clever—would mean having “to start from scratch” to get the word out, he says.

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. Dominator says

    It’s quite easy to see that those changing are getting caught up in the hype. Just reading about the plans the custom.bike has for his site illustrates that. I think it is highly likely the guy has the expertise to set up a site for picture sharing. And he’s just thinking about the possibilities and there it is highly unlikely that there will actually be any follow through on those plans.

    And the new .gtld program is going to need some big companies to adopt and implement them to have success. A bunch of small businesses that probably get under 10 visitors a day to their sites isn’t going to do a thing to move the needle. And that is especially true when each of those very small businesses is using a different .whatever.

  2. domainsquared says

    So what happens when Mr Schilling has his hopes dashed when he can’t get custom.bike? Will he still be happy to purchase a ‘.bike’ domain after his ‘ideal’ domain is gone or will he be happy with something like ‘yourcustom.bike, bestcustom.bike’? And this probably defeats his original intent of getting a more marketable (and shorter) domain name.
    Every example given for these new gTLD’s always show the ideal scenario for the new extension which to me also shows their limitation.

  3. Tony Lam says

    What will happen is domainers will get the best of the gTLD domains or the registries reserve them and these end users will find out that it will be just as expensive to buy one of these as it is to upgrade their .com (to a better .com). The difference is the .com is well established, low risk and will cost $8/yr vs .who-knows-what.

  5. Steven Sikes says

    I recently saw the creative & ingenious movie “HER”, which is set in the “Not Too Distant Future” (estimate, 2025). Based on the storyline, I guess the gTLD didn’t do too well. The websites highlighted were all .com.

  6. Grim says

    Yes, all the gTLDs will have a handful of nice ‘hacks’, (Racing.Bike, BuyA.bike, FrenchKissYour.Bike, etc) but beyond names like that, “the good ones will all be taken”. (We need more gTLDs to fix that!!!)

    Little Johnny Domain Investor won’t have a chance at getting anything ‘good’.