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Hate “.com”? How About a New, Totally Branded Domain?
By Paul Richlovsky | June 27, 2008
Tired of .com, .org, and .net? .biz or .mobi not doing it for you?
“Let a thousand domains flower …”
For 6 figures apiece.
As reported in today’s NY Times, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) announced yesterday in Paris that it would soon allow companies, organizations, or countries to use new suffixes in their top-level domains. It will also allow non-Roman language scripts like Chinese.
The Most Interesting Points of the Article
- Commerical Brouhaha: Competing groups will vie for city names while spammers will try to get product names for phishing scams.
- Companies are going to have “first priority” to protect their brand names … at a 6-figure cost.
- Internet activists: “consumers are going to be confused.”
- Auctions, independent reviews, and 3rd-party challenges will be used to settle conflicts.
Search Engine Marketing Questions
Will .bud automatically be seen as the right of Anheuser-Busch, or can a marijauna advocacy group lay claim to it?
How will Google choose to rank the new suffixes, knowing that they are costly purchases? Will there be a new class of sponsored listings, or will they go in the traditional organic results?
Is is really worth it to pay that much for more branding in your domain? If you’re a large corporation, maybe it’s a no-brainer. But for small- and medium-sized businesses, that could be a significant expenditure with perhaps little return, especially if you’re already doing well in Google rankings.
As the editor of Domain Journal stated in the article, it also might be harder for users to remember new suffixes, especially if everything is up for grabs. Even if browser bookmarking technology continues to grow more sophisticated, there may be a certain number of people you lose who can’t remember your .city or .state or .book or .travel suffix.
It is good that the Icann board will be hearing public opinion before the next major meeting in November. If enough people voice concern about what could be a robber baron era for Internet domains, maybe this flight of fancy will never leave the ground.
Photo courtesy of basykes via Flickr
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June 27th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
What would Anheuser-Busch even do with .bud? Would http://www.(anything).bud just go to their homepage? Would it be http://www.bud.bud?
June 30th, 2008 at 8:29 am
Don’t forget to mention that buying a new top-level domain would be considered a new website in the eyes of the engines. If your site already ranks well, why start from scratch AND pay 6 figures? If anything, I could see the big companies buying these domains and maybe doing a redirect from the .com domain to the branded domain.
June 30th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Well, who decided that Icann gets to control all of the domain naming power globally? Did I miss the vote, memo, mandate, etc?
Great find though Paul! I always get giddy when I get a email update knowing you posted!!! :D
June 30th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Sometimes I have a hard enough time remembering if it is a .com .org or .biz. Now throwing these new suffixes in will only confuse more people. Especially those that don’t exactly know how the internet works like my Grandma.
June 30th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Why would anyone do this? It just seems to add to confusion.
July 12th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
This was just a matter of time, and hot news for domain sellers and investors - I think a lot of people are thrilled about this (from spammers to affiliates to niche webmasters). There’s a couple suffixes out there now that still haven’t taken off, so we’ll see which survive.