new gtlds Finally! A big TV campaign for a new gTLD (nGTLD)

[News]

Well MMX the operator of Dot London have pushed a national TV campaign in the UK and on the 2 largest paid for by ads channels here ITV and Channel4. No obscure satellite niche channel, this is mainstream.

The TV Ad campaign started last week. Dot London has been very stable since its launch in 2014 and continues to have between 60k and 80k registrations. It also has a tie-up with EPIK who is promoting the space and looks to sell premium names.

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[JB Lions]

Well MMX the operator of Dot London have pushed a national TV campaign in the UK and on the 2 largest paid for by ads channels here ITV and Channel4. No obscure satellite niche channel, this is mainstream.

The TV Ad campaign started last week. Dot London has been very stable since its launch in 2014 and continues to have between 60k and 80k registrations. It also has a tie-up with EPIK who is promoting the space and looks to sell premium names.

Read More

Eric, this seems like a fail. I saw on the other blog you said "Slowly but surely, new gTLDs are going mainstream and building up momentum."

Not really.

I just tried all the urls in that commercial

shave.london - epik parked page

gardener.london - This site can’t be reached

handyman.london - 123reg website builder page

bananas.london - get my cable companies search result page

caps.london - get my cable companies search result page

Are they supposed to go to pages that would just confuse people?

I couldn't tell if the ad was supposed to let people know of real businesses already built on .london with those examples, it went 0/5 if that was the case. Or just advertising those urls for sale? Then another 0/5 for landing page.

 

[Lox]

Strange things happen when not-for-profit public private taking a care + funded by the Mayor of London and subsidized commercial partners.

 

[forge]

Good catch, JB. That's just really embarrassing. These registries continue to do themselves no favor with big claims that are so easily debunked. Having launched in 2014, this kind of stunt aka media push seems rather desperate.

I'm not here to bash gTLDs, but for the most part they are pretty underwhelming. End of story in my playbook.

 

[GeorgeK]

If you look at their new registrations via nTLDstats.com or namestat.org, it's an ineffective campaign. According to namestat.org, the average number of daily registrations in the past 7 days for .london is just 49.

 

[Kate]

It looks like a botched and confusing campaign. Quoting .com domains while failing to explain your TLD only reinforces .com. I don't think normal people are going to get the message. At the end of the spot they mention makeyours.london but not long enough. They could have chosen another domain, it just redirects to http://domains.london. Big fail overall.

 

[DOMAIN ILLUMINATI]

Like ccTLDs, all geo - nTLDs, in this case .london, naturally will always have "geo - limited consumer numbers (registrations)" in the long run - no ad will change this drastically.

Because London is in an economic view "big enough" for it's own TLD, they (created it and) advertise it - I think, if just 1 % of all London's citizen's (about 8.8 M) would reg. a .london TLD, it will pay off (for the registry). According to http://www.namestat.org/london, that's about the current (Feb. 2018) registration umber (about 83,3 K reg.).

 

[dordomai]

I do not know why people want to believe the world cares about new extensions or domains in general. They have been out for years and the average guy does and will never care about them.

They could be mainstream maybe 10-20 years from now, perhaps never. certainly not this year or one year from now, not even 5.

the reason why not much happens is because people never wanted or desired these extensions in the first place

many large brands actually opposed them.

 

[dordomai]

Eric, this seems like a fail. I saw on the other blog you said "Slowly but surely, new gTLDs are going mainstream and building up momentum."

Not really.

I just tried all the urls in that commercial

shave.london - epik parked page

gardener.london - This site can’t be reached

handyman.london - 123reg website builder page

bananas.london - get my cable companies search result page

caps.london - get my cable companies search result page

Are they supposed to go to pages that would just confuse people?

I couldn't tell if the ad was supposed to let people know of real businesses already built on .london with those examples, it went 0/5 if that was the case. Or just advertising those urls for sale? Then another 0/5 for landing page.

i think this means that there arent any good examples of developed .london sites or they are too hard to find even for the registries or the guys making that ad.

 

[Kate]

The .paris registry may have been a bit more mature. They recruited a number of well-known brands to act as 'ambassadors' for the .paris TLD but all those brand owners already own .com .fr etc and many .paris are mere redirects. So even that is not enough to get traction among end users. They don't care.
The only notable end user I know is the Eiffel tower. This is not going to move the needle.

 

[dordomai]

The .paris registry may have been a bit more mature. They recruited a number of well-known brands to act as 'ambassadors' for the .paris TLD but all those brand owners already own .com .fr etc and many .paris are mere redirects. So even that is not enough to get traction among end users. They don't care.
The only notable end user I know is the Eiffel tower. This is not going to move the needle.

isnt there a .tower extension yet?