sdsinc said:
How ?
It takes development and hard work to make money, even with a decent TLD, which .tel is not. The key is to build traffic, attract visitors and last but not least provide a useful service and a great experience so your visitors will be coming back.
Ask yourself: would you even use a .tel domain when looking for directory information ?
I concur.
I know what .tel is and does.
I'm pretty sure the only times I will
ever look at a .tel 'domain' is when I'm reasonably sure I know who owns it i.e. if I wanted to call Joe Bloggs Industries and their number was not to hand, I may remember seeing joebloggsindustries.tel on their contact details and go there for the number.
Say my fictional company, Joe Bloggs Industries, made widgets, I'm not going to go to widgets.tel and wade through a directory (like hotels.tel) to find Joe Bloggs Industries' entry; likewise if I didn't know the company name and was looking for a widget supplier. I'd grab my local phone book or go to yell.com (or similar site) because I know these contain a comprehensive list of companies, whereas it's likely widgets.tel will not.
I suggest everyone who's getting over-excited go back to the telnic site and read again what you can actually do with the sites then ask yourself honestly can I create a big enough directory
and spend the amount of money (millions?) required to market this one name to the degree where
your average internet user thinks "instead of going to the pizzeria section of my yellow pages, or typing it in to yell.com, I'm going to try that pizzeria.tel site". I'm
not saying it can't be done- it can, but it's going to take a hell of a lot of time and money.
With this in mind, I think .tel's best chance is to be
marketed as an extension for finding contact info "on the go"- if you've had a look at hotels.tel on your mobile phone it zips along at lightning speed, and most importantly when you've found your result you can download a vCard. (
It is brilliant :tu: )
I think anyone planning on buying a generic-y type name, and not planning on sticking a few $ยฃโฌ's behind it for marketing, is going to be dependent on companies buy their own .tel names, using them and
marketing them so that there is greater .tel-awareness amongst users. Even if that happens, I bet a lot still won't go to whatever.tel and stick with the likes of yell.com
(Here's where I can draw a parallel with .mobi, a friend was looking up some results on skysports.com on a mobile phone and it was taking a while to load, I asked "is there a skysports.mobi?", the reply- "what the hell's dot mobey?!"
If there had been marketing by anyone of any sort of .mobi name he may have thought to try the .mobi whether or not he knew there was a .mobi site... I'm not picking on .mobi, I'm sure .biz would be met with similar questioning but that's a real-life example)
I can see some of this sounds a bit negative, but I
absolutely love the idea behind .tel, and only wish it came around 10+ years ago. If it had, I'm sure it would have become the de facto standard contact system on the internet and mobile devices by now.
To anyone who does try to build a directory, please keep us up-to-date with your progress, and I do wish you all the best.
