When i heard what the fee(~ $350k or so?) needed to start your own TLD, i realized it will only be a dream and reality of the big,connected and rich. How many people will pay that much just to start a new, little typed-in extension? I know many top dogs will do it, but what about the "great" .coms they've used so long already to establish their identity? will abc tv really wanna stop using or give up abc.com for .abc? DOmainers get excited EVERYTIME about new TLDs. thats what this is about. Its naive too, because so many of us on this forum for example have invested in many mediocre,low type-in extensions, thereby watering down the whoe TLD market. Diversity is good, but i'm not getting too caught up in this "create-your-own" TLD nonsense. Icann is another mother.. because this brings in more money for them, and they have a good story for why they are doing it(at least to themselves they do).
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I think there is a misconception here that a company with deep pockets may forgo the com in favor of starting their own TLD when their real option is to go with a new TLD run by someone else that suits their business.
eg. instead of buying nyrealestate.com
they can buy realestate.ny from whoever is running .ny, they don't have to administer the entire .ny tld.
maybe they go with nyc.realestate instead, basically they will have many more options, none of which require them to deal with the $100K TLD startup costs/effort.
You can't hardly find ANY generic .com for that today.
I think that isn't out of the question.
Look... for YEARS the domain industry has REFUSED to think like the Madison Avenue Marketing Managers and that is the reason why this domain extension issue is occurring.
For Fortune 500s it is NOT about being generic, it is about being SPECIFIC. They believe MORE in the foundation of "educating your consumer" that riding the winds of chance.
Even now, from my own personal experience, there are companies planning entire marekting schemes and promotional releases around their... and I quote... "THEIR OWN IDENTITY"
That is the way it is being pitched and sold.
If ABC wants to brand itself as WHATEVERSHOW.ABC... they WILL and in fact, I almost guarantee that is what is coming. It's quick and easy for the consumer to identify with, it makes tracking and rating their shows and services easy and most importantly... it is BRANDABLE.
.com is not a brand. .ABC is a brand. .NBC is a brand and I suspect that all of them will follow suit.
I am NOT saying they will abandon their .com. That would be ridiculous since they are already vested in its existence. But they certainly wouldn't spend one thin dime in buying up other domains when they have unlimited access to the full dictionary at .ABC.
ABC.com will redirect to their home page and every other thing they do will have that memorable .ABC
This is the exact SIGH OF RELIEF that the Marketing community and the businesses they represent has been waiting for...
The opportunity for THEM, not YOU, to define what has or doesn't have value in the Internet Address book.
Add to that the fact that Cyber-squatting will become virtually impossible for extensions such as ABC... it's a dream come true.
The will pay less than one premium .com for an ETERNITY of domain options.
Slightly OT but still in with the disscussion of the thread.
Does anyone else think that the timing of Icanns TLD announcement in cojunction with the CCtld .me has been well timed.... as its one CCtld that can be used by most people (more than .tv). I apreciate that it is a country code top level domain but it has far more potential vanity uses than .uk or .eu etc seemingly blurrying the difference between TLDs,STLDs and CCTLDs
I don't think the dot com era is going to end anytime soon unless 2/3 of today's corporations pick up on the new extensions. The average Internet user will then realize that there's more to the Internet than .com, .net, .org, .gov, and .edu.
I think the only misconception is the inflated sense of self-worth we domainers seem to have in all of this. Add a dash of denial and a sprinkle of hopeful failure for the new movement and I think you have the .com cake that we can either have or eat... but shortly no longer both.
Ironically, these are the very same "deep pockets" that you and everyone else have been hoping and preying upon to pay extraordinary prices for our generic .com domains.
Why would they pay $150K for ONE domain, when they can pay $150K om;y once for EVERY domain they will ever need? I wouldn't.
If EVER there was a change designed to move the market OFF the .com platform... THIS IS IT. The only thing more enticing than a solid .com is your own extension with a marketing budget behind you.
so it might turn out to be contactme.abc then abc.com/contactme.htm or usa.mcd then www.mcdonalds.com/usa.html ? for me or new generation end user would love to type usa.mcd then mcd.com/usa.html (my though and think this should be the way for URL)
If this is the case then a good subdomain hack should be worth some money ......
Do we need a third/fourth thread discussing the ICANN news of new extensions?
Can't they be stickied and merged? Same exact discussion.
In other words people are going to continue to trust CNO. How much is trust worth to you or any company?
How many here have an account at a small bank vs ones with accounts at major nationals? How many here have insurance through a small home town carrier? Who here is going to start their business with .cool or .fun or .new?
Heh, I saw this and recalled back to the auction at the last DomainFest, where I believe it was Taxicab.com or Taxicabs.com that was in the auction with min bid $40k and no one grabbed it. If I had the money I would have gotten it but it was literally just out of reach financially for me.
Anyways, here's my stance: .com is to extensions like Google is to search. There are tons of different search engines out there, including niche ones (the ".mobi"s of search), barely used ones (the ".name", etc.), and of course Yahoo and MSN trailing Google by a mile like they have for eons. My prediction is that other extensions will affect the value/prices of .com the same time that other search engines will affect the success of Google. In other words, don't hold your breath.
I personally think this is ICANN's way to incite stupid unknowledged companies and investors to throw their money away, the same way that new extensions like .im (anyone remember the buzz over that one on here?) and the like do to domain investors every time they come out. That's not to say EVERYONE doing it will lose money. Just like someone probably got poker.im, travel.im, etc., someone will undoubtedly get a really solid word or set of letters such that they can make their money back and possibly some profit. But it will be a tiny percentage of the companies that start these extensions, and look at what 100+ non-.com extensions have done to the value of .com over the past 10+ years...anything? Anything at all?
I would sooner worry about the downward spiraling economy and its continuing affect on domains and what people will pay for them. That HAS been affecting domain prices and will continue to.
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in my opinion .com will still stay king as it is still more widely known about. However the sales will decline as businesses will buy .london .paris and so on domains..instead of buying from people like us (domainers)
I think this is a silly debate. How many .tld's have really taken off? How many .cctld's have really taken off? By taken off, I mean they are the prefered extension. A handful. Really, just a handful. Maybe 5%.
Those on here who are voicing opinions that .com is going to end are failing to grasp the fact that YOU ARE A DOMAINER. You are intimately familiar with other extensions because you have to be - whether domaining is a job or a hobby.
Domainers are an INFINITESIMAL segment of the internet-using population. The internet-using population knows the .com extension. Most know .net. Very few know other ones. Next to no one knows .mobi. You tell a non-domainer internet user to visit a site and you say it's called smallsegmentofpopulation dot *blank* - 99 out of 100 will just follow the words you say and type in .com, regardless of what extension you may have said.
Is this likely to change? I seriously doubt it. The internet isn't exactly new anymore and .com is CEMENTED in the consciousness of internet users. Why would any company risk losing visitors or confusing internet users by using a proprietary extension? It doesn't make sense for there to be 8 billion extensions for people to have to remember - that's just bad business.
Just my two cents. However, I'm sure these two cents are right on the money. Pardon the pun.
You seem to have a very US-centric view of ccTLDs. You also seem to be unaware that where there are strong ccTLDs, they are at parity with .com (or near to it) in those countries. After .net, there is .de ccTLD. After .net, there is .uk - another ccTLD. Spain surpassed one million .es domains recently and Netherlands' .nl has over 2 million or so from what I remember. Where English is not the first language, the ccTLD registrations often seem to outnumber the .com and gTLD registrations. There are over two hundred ccTLDs - some of them are not even active. Some only have a handful of domains compared to .com or the gTLDs. And others are beating .com in their markets. The next major shift in the market will be towards ccTLDs and it has been happening over the last five years or so. However because people and domainers only concentrate on the big picture of the .com, they are missing the fragmentation and specialisation of the market at a country level. The super geo type domains, .berlin, .london, .nyc may well have the size of market necessary to sustain a TLD. But others will end up as niche extensions.
it will take a lot of money to promote a new extension. If the new extension is not promoted, it will have little traffic, thus not much contents. Thus while you may find one or two new growing extension, you may also find lot of abandoned extensions in the future.
so you are saying if NBC started their .nbc extension and started marketing it then people wouldnt trust that .nbc would be owned by NBC? They would be more likely to believe in .nets? Take the NBC show 30 Rock for example: I guarantee if NBC advertised 30Rock.nbc i think people would think there is a MUCH higher chance of that being a real NBC site than if they typed in 30Rock.com. Surprise Surprise I just typed in 30Rock.com and it is a parked page, lol. Do you think for their show NBC would make 30Rock.nbc a parked page? If the general public stops thinking in terms of ".com" then that will greatly destroy its value.
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Last edited by nrmillions : 07-08-2008 at 08:52 PM.
He said maybe 5% and out of 240+ CCTLD's...you mention a handful. That's less than 5% my friend. As for your take on the US-Centric view...can I ask you who invented the internet?
And dotcom has an immediate international acceptance and appeal. A US-Centric view would focus on .us wouldn't it? What good would a .es be to someone that doesn't have an English language site. Do you think someone in japan is going to really register a .co.uk? Yeah..they might get their own .jp but I have a feeling they would want to be international and shoot for the dot com.
It's really a shame people are so frightened of how other TLD's are going to effect their portfolio's when time and time again it is proven that dot com is king and that any attempt to dismount it are met with dot com getting STRONGER.
You're dealing with fiction. NBC has NBC.com. If NBC bothers to get their own extension I will eat my underwear. Why would NBC bother to create an extension for themselves? At best it would be for internal purposes. They don't have need to be an extension holder. Someone like AOL might but they aren't NBC now are they.
Most companies are simply not going to bother with the process no matter how simple it is. Listen...these companies rarely bother to register their trademark in new extensions like .mobi or .info. What honestly makes you think established companies are suddenly going to deal with opening an extension? It's more likely we will see .fun, .web, .xxx, and others that are generic but they will have limited novelty appeal. Dot com is a proven viable business extension where having a brandable dot com can lead to riches. Digg.com, Youtube.com, Myspace.com, and Facebook.com...all huge sites born of recent years now worth BILLIONS. Did they start as facebook.info and myspace.org? Nope. They used the best location on the internet...dot com.
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