A History Lesson for future TLDS

[Sam]

With the launch of future gTLDS lets look a bit back on previous launches:

2000 (icann approved)- .aero .biz .coop .info .museum .name .pro

The only one midly successful is .info. .BIZ you can argue that it has a small relative value.

The rest were pretty much resell failures.

2004 (Icann approved)- .asia .cat .jobs .mobi .tel .travel

All failures. Remember the ".mobi hype"?! :yell: LLL.mobis being sold for a couple hundred a piece (are you serious?)

.TRAVEL ironically has the most name recognition (albiet small). With commercials featuring the .travel extention

.eu (2005)- Pretty much a failure, although it has slight end user use when you have multinational companies.

So out of ALL launched gTLDS:

14 Total

1 Real success story in terms of resale value (.info). You could argue for .biz... but its minimal.

DO NOT FALL FOR THE TRAP this time around. Be smart.

 

[Kate]

Thanks for this timely reminder.

Unfortunately history repeats itself.
Every time a new extension was released, domainers took a chance and got burned (most of the time). Most have learned their lesson and moved on. A few did not learn and would repeat the same mistake again and again.
Then you have the next generation of domainers coming in, they don't do research and don't look at the recent past. So they will end up making the same mistakes as their predecessors.


Had Icann drawn the appropriate conclusions like you just did, the new gTLD program would never have been approved.
Because it's a solution to a non-existent problem.

But they don't care because they are selling licences to print money and won't be holding the bag.

 

[mjnels]

well, i think its going to be fun.