AsiaOne.com wrote an article today that talked about brands in Asia that will be adopting their own brand extension and using it over .com or say .co.jp.
One company mentioned in the article was Dai Nippon Printing Co, the company is publicly traded in Japan. The company said that the new domain has been attractive for regular consumers, but, still uses its previous domain at dnp.co.jp.
Of course that makes sense for any company that switches to a new gtld, but for me the confusion was what to use for the .DNP website ? When I read the article it says “it has been attractive” so I figured it was in use. So I tried www.dnp, dnp.dnp, corp.dnp, and a bunch of others. Then I Googled site:.dnp and found some sites, it looks like start.dnp is the preferred address to get started.
I would have never guessed start.dnp, this is why I believe there has to be some universal start point for dot brand domains. I think www.brand makes the most sense as a starting point, the average user is familiar with that naming scheme.
From the article:
Late last year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private organisation that manages domain names, allowed a series of companies to use company names and brand names as top-level domains.
In the wake of the decisions, Hitachi Ltd. plans to use “.hitachi” with its top-level domain in addition to the current domain name with “hitachi.co.jp.” Canon Inc. will also use its domain name “canon.jp” as well as “.canon” as a new top-level domain.
Among Japanese companies, about 50, including Toyota Motor Corp., Nissan Motor Co., Sony Corp. and NTT Corp. are scheduled to adopt new domain names.
Among Japanese companies, Dai Nippon Printing Co. received permission to use its brand name as its top-level domain – “.dnp” – which it began using in June 2014.
The company said the new domain name has been attractive for ordinary consumers. To avoid confusion among Internet users, the company uses its previous top-level domain – “dnp.co.jp” simultaneously.
– See more at: http://news.asiaone.com/news/asia/major-firms-use-names-website-domain-suffixes#sthash.UpQw2iwa.dpuf
Raymond-this is exactly why we mentioned here a couple of weeks ago about the .MOE (out of Japan) climbing up the ranks of extensions recently.We saw some of the major companies there buying this extension-along with their own im sure. Thank you for posting this.
One other thing is that these extensions,either the companies or .MOE, can be read in English unlike some of the newer Chinese extensions.
You’re right that there needs to be an SLD convention for dot brand home page addresses.
I’m not sure “www” is the right choice. Saying it aloud in TV and radio ads is a bit of a mouthful, and speaking the “www” comes across as dated. Remember when the world wide web was new and unfamiliar? Television was constantly saying, “Visit us at http://www. etc.” Sort of kills the fun of a new TLD.
But if browsers were able to dispense with the “www” in dot Brand subdomains as we already do when we type “TheDomains.com” instead of “www.thedomains.com”, then that would be pretty cool. I mean, if you could just type in .brand and have Firefox automatically infer “www” or whatever the convention ends up being, then you’d go straight to the dot brand home page.
I used the most popular search engine in Japan (as I understand) yahoo.co.jp and did a search on DNP’s Japanese name 大日本印刷. The 1st name returned is dnp.co.jp. I also found plaza.dnp and dnpenguin.dnp on the first page. Japan is a unusual place where most people prefer using the search box rather than direct navigation. When you read ads in a Japanese newspaper, you see most advertisers put a search box in their ad with a keyword they want you to enter. Most Japanese consumers do not remember website names. They just type the company name instead. So, in this case, it does not matter what extension you use. BTW, DNP does not own dnp.com.
My interpretation is that .co.jp just does not represent internation companies. .com is more universal but running out of names. 大日本 means “Big Japan” and DNP is just a phonic abbreviation of the company’s English name. I see company name TLD has limited appeal. Only company with names that are both short and ubiquitous, and willing to partner with a third party TLD manager does this make sense. It is a lot of people not just in marketing you have to convince.
I think entering .brand as direct navigation will be cooooooooooool
I don’t think ICANN allow a TLD to wildcard at the Registry DNS level even for dotbrands. Does anyone know? That means you need to type something in before the .brand, and at least three letters. Isn’t going to happen
Technically, isn’t the “http://” part of the full address? Yet browsers attach it without our having to write it. So it seems to me that browsers can make inferences about a user’s URL intentions as they please.
But this isn’t an area where I’m knowledgeable. People are welcome to correct me.
I think it is like the RealNames idea tried in the 90s. Here, if all browser makers agree to the standard of converting .brand to nic.brand, then it shall work.
It’s more complicated than that.
Mostly to manage session persistence between requests, cookies get passed back and forth between the browser and server.
That has implications for how you’d manage your naming under a “.brand”. Cookies under “starwars.disney” wouldn’t be available to “marvel.disney” and vice versa, [Specifically, 5.3 (5) of RFC 6265 refers to a list when discussing whether to accept cookies for a “public suffix”, but I suspect actual browser behavior would be unpredictable for a “.brand”.] As such, I’d say most will end up as “www.disney” or “home.disney” or redirects to a non-brand tld.
I’m sure you’re right. But there are always workarounds. If a browser wants to handle lots of dot brands in some outwardly simple, internally complicated way, then they will make it happen and issue guidance to the webmasters for those brands.
I don’t say that browsers will want to devote time and energy to this or that they should, but I daresay new protocol and conventions would arise if they did.