CampaignLive.com is a community website focused on the advertising industry, they put out a piece on the new gtlds and looked at the critics and a few who are using the new gtlds.
On the critic side there were comments from brands that too much of the profit seems to be coming from a shakedown of those with intellectual property interests. Dot Sucks is discussed in detail, and a mention on Taylor Swift purchasing .porn and .adult.
There was upside of Lions Gate Entertainment using a .movie for the official site of the Hunger Games and an ad agency Upshot rebranding to a .agency domain from Upshot.net.
Bill Sweetman of Name Ninja was quoted in the article as saying:
the value of even neutral-sounding notcoms like .MOVIE and .BIKE is far from guaranteed, says Bill Sweetman, president of Name Ninja, a company that consults on naming and helps brands buy domain names. “Today, to launch a consumer-facing brand on something other than a .COM is risky.” Most consumers are not aware of the new top-level domains and assume companies will be found at .COM, or possibly .NET or .ORG. Therefore, according to Sweetman, when a company’s website is advertised via traditional media where they can’t just click, consumers are unlikely to remember the correct suffix.
A bigger issue, he says, is that just because all these new names are being released, it doesn’t mean that companies will be able to get them and use them. Instead, they may go to speculators who will try to resell them to brands at big markups. Sweetman adds, “Sadly, a lot of the operators of these new domains are companies that have decades of experience in speculating in domain names. It’s a bit like foxes being put in charge of the chicken coop.”
Read the full article at CampaignLive.com
going all-in preflop with two queens is risky. launching a consumer facing brand on anything other than a dot com is idiotic.
@RaTHeaD It’s time for blind .com defenders such as yourself to reevaluate the cards on the table and think about folding. How are new businesses supposed to find a desirable .com name when over 280 million have already been registered? Verisign themselves admitted it’s difficult to find a desirable .com name that’s still available.
I’d also love to hear you elaborate as to why a domain extension that directly describes a brand’s product or service is idiotic.
A lot of people made money from speculations, sure, but increase supply will just diminish the value of each new domain extensions, because the names are valuable because of the branding, not because of the speculations.
switching from a dot net to a dot agency – well it is still the same story – and the same ending – they could not get the dot com.
yes rat – idiotic is the word…
Winston – non dot coms are 100% about speculation (with a few dedicated soldiers I am sure) – where dot coms is probably ONLY 95% speculation 🙂
two days one popular SEO blog published an article about ‘search metrics’ related to news sites / magazine sites got boost in google serp in its latest algorithm update. The blog put some 10 sites and links to it including time.com, etc. Only one site was dict.CC domain which was included in the list. Guess what, I clicked on all 9 links except dict.cc because all 9 were .com (trusted) and .cc was in my mind (wtf if it’s spam or wrong link or some malicious site wrongly linked to? Secondly, in the comments section of the same blog post, lots of seo experts, webmasters, etc. commented about most of the .com sites, but no one commented on that .cc domain. (that dict.cc is a English-german dictionary site btw). This also shows that forget about common internet users, even, seo and webmasters don’t consider non-dot com domains worth visiting/considering or worth legitimate. If this is the case among webmasters, then one can certainly predict consumer-behavior!
Another point I want to note about .com and other TLDs/ccTLDs, here in india, there is very popular classifieds site called OLX.IN which spends millions on funny tv ads to promote themselves. When I meet my friends who are non-domainers/non-webmasters/non-bloggers, such guys who only use fb and twitter, while refering to the funny ad they mention it OLX.COM and not .IN. So, launching a consumer facing brand on anything other than a dot com is idiotic.
Eric-
maybe some kind of coin collection analogy. Quantity is no replacement for quality. I would trade all my 1909 pennies for 1 uncirculated 1909 – and anyone who took me up on that would be a fool and an idiot.
but good luck – proceed with caution – that is all the rat is implying as well.
brian
The world is not the US market but for some, the US market seems to be their world. What may apply in the US market does not necessarily apply in other country level markets.
I expect that MANY consumers — including myself — are very wary of an odd-looking domain. I view it as a high risk of a phishing or malware -type danger. I am confident to click on coke.com, but NOT on coke.biz, coke.soda or whatever other gtld someone thought up last week.
There is not a .soda