This is the registry releasing the names in batches. Six months of names. You'll realize it's not real news, if you go look at the list.
It's so easy to get pulled in by the hype. I bought around thirty
PERFECT dot online in my niche early on. I was very excited about it. These were domains that if I had even marginally in .com would have set me up for life. I developed five of them and got no traffic at all. None whatsoever! The sites never got above page 10 in Google or Bing. Set me back a few months of my time. I can get traffic and decent rankings on the crappiest .com, .net or .org out there, but never had an ounce of success with these new domains.
That being said, the kicker here is email, it will always be email. Call it email security, email bleed, misdirected email, whatever. If I tell someone my email is
[email protected], half the time they're gonna send it to
[email protected]. This is a fact. You would not believe some of the emails that get sent to the wrong address. Pics of drivers licenses, NDAs, confidential price lists, quotes, cheaters, hospital information, student information, you name it, it gets misaddressed and sent.
Let me give a crystal clear example. I own airconditioning.online (or airconditioning.wtfever for that matter) and I compete against airconditioning.com. You want to guess what happens? My customers are sending confidential emails to my competition on a daily basis. It's not my fault. I know the difference between dot online and dot com. I tell them I'm dot online not dot com. I try to educate my customers about my domain name. Guess what? Your customers do not know the difference!!!!!! They do not care about domain names!!!!!! Your customer just sent your confidential price quote to the competition!!!!! Your customer knows dot com, they don't know dot wtfever!!!!!! All you've done is waste time and money. If you own or start a business, you get the shortest and most meaningful dot com you can afford. Period.
For arguments sake. Test it! Do some research on your own. Set up catch all email on a decent dot com, one with dot net, dot org, dot whatever domains developed and being used. If you aren't using a short, descriptive, easy to spell and remember dot com for your business, I 100% guarantee that you will lose emails to the registrant of that short, descriptive, easy to spell and remember dot com. I hope it's not the competition.
I was just as big a fan about the new domains when I first started, too. They had the potential to level the playing field for the guys that came late. They were supposed to be the perfect match of left and right. What's happened is the opposite. They're not for business. They're too confusing, spammy looking, and expensive. And, most don't make any sense at all. Origin.tech for $10k! And, I'm not supposed to laugh and shake my head. The registry is the only one making money here, people.