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atlas
07-06-12, 12:43 AM
Edwin's written a thoughtful article about the new .brand TLDs:

http://www.webmastering.co.uk/uncategorized/the-new-brand-tlds-are-destined-to-fail/


For most brands, trying to establish their .brand in the minds of consumers will be like trying to drain the ocean with a drinking straw.

aZooZa
07-06-12, 01:18 AM
Basically, the vast majority of the British consumer population only think .uk or .com. When I say "think", I mean they're the only extensions that are instantly meaningful. And it will stay that way now. I don't believe the corporates are going to buy into this ICANN honeypot.

aZooZa
09-06-12, 01:57 AM
What's your take on the latest ICANN coffer-expansion exercise?

I found 'Schindler's list' today:

http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/05/technology/donuts-domains-funding/index.htm?iid=EL

Can you imagine all those investors jumping on this destined-to-fail bandwagon! Money to churn and burn?

To the uninitiated, Schindler's site - www.donuts.co - might appear to hail from the Republic of Colombia. But with $100,000,000 of funding, it wouldn't be unreasonable for Mr Schindler to have covered his bases...

Alas, www.donuts.com - parked.

invincible
12-06-12, 05:03 AM
I don't believe it's possible to state whether the .whatevers will succeed or fail because it'll simply come down to the organisations backing the respective ".whatever" and how they decide to market it. I won't be surprised to see .google, .coke or .banc/bank. I'd expect a few clever brand managers, in collaboration with some of the worlds top brands to think of some "smart" uses of a few new .whatevers (largely where an extension remains a closed registry). So www.coke could become a reality (or even just .coke - pronounced dot coke). This reminds me a bit of Realnames.com (turn of the century keyword system that ended up failing). We may also, in time, see another couple of useful registries launch for limited specifics. Ultimately, though, humans can only cope with so many extensions and so many may end up as vanity extensions for existing huge brands to redirect their whatever.com to just .whatever.

Mojoco
12-06-12, 11:56 AM
It will be interesting to see what Frank Schilling and co have applied for.

Managing Director Frank Schilling and other established industry veterans, is pleased to announce that it has applied to ICANN to operate certain new top-level domains


http://www.marketwatch.com/story/frank-schilling-and-team-launch-uniregistry-corp-2012-06-11

Edwin
12-06-12, 11:06 PM
http://www.webmastering.co.uk/domain-names/the-new-gtlds-a-slow-motion-marketing-car-crash-waiting-to-happen/ :)

invincible
12-06-12, 11:15 PM
http://www.webmastering.co.uk/domain-names/the-new-gtlds-a-slow-motion-marketing-car-crash-waiting-to-happen/ :)

Take the example of .nike, as representative of a “large brand”. It would be self-destructive in the extreme for Nike to switch to promoting .nike extensions exclusively, since they would be throwing away every penny they’d spent on branding Nike.com over the years. At the same time, the average consumer reaction is likely to be a shrug and a “Silly Nike, they’ve misprinted their URL” if they even pick up on the fact that it’s supposed to be a URL in the first place. After all, we’re conditioned to intuitively understand that something that begins “www” and ends “.co.uk” is a URL. But something that begins in “www” and ends “.nike”? That’s just a recipe for blank stares all round…
We are conditioned to understand how a URL is constructed but people can be conditioned into understanding other things, in time. It depends who does it and how they do it. Hence impossible to say new .tlds will always be a failure forever. Given time, habits can be changed or expanded.

atlas
12-06-12, 11:44 PM
Thanks Edwin. Great article!

What do you think about niche gTLDs, such as .law? If big organsations like the American Bar Association get behind this and recommend that their members adopt it, I can imagine lawyers might well use it (as there is a lot of group think in a profession) and domains such as PersonalInjury.law should be worth something.

Also, there seem to be some keywords that are valuable no matter what the extension, e.g. Poker. Do you think that Poker.web, Poker.site, etc. would have a lot of value?

Do you think it's worth investing in the stock of some of these companies that are applying for the new gtlds?

GreyWing
13-06-12, 12:56 AM
Thanks Edwin. Great article!

What do you think about niche gTLDs, such as .law? If big organsations like the American Bar Association get behind this and recommend that their members adopt it, I can imagine lawyers might well use it (as there is a lot of group think in a profession) and domains such as PersonalInjury.law should be worth something.

Also, there seem to be some keywords that are valuable no matter what the extension, e.g. Poker. Do you think that Poker.web, Poker.site, etc. would have a lot of value?

Do you think it's worth investing in the stock of some of these companies that are applying for the new gtlds?

I can't see it happening mate, only one company can have have injury.law then you have just pissed off the rest of the solicitors that wanted it. By god the law suits on who has what on there are going to be funny to watch, people just suing the hell out of each other looking at a domain the wrong way.

But soon as those guys have bought up all the .law's, same as .tel and .mobi...... out comes the new better brand of .legal then .justice and it goes on and on until they are all competing with each other. Before you know it someone who wanted injury.law has gone to their competitor at injury.legal because of all the confusion.

So yes all the 1000 or so major names will be bought up but that will be it.

What they are doing by launching these .brands and letting almost anyone with cash running them is rolling out the .uk.com stuff on a higher level. No network financial security, some legal complaints and if the administrators of the .brand can't afford to fight its possible the whole network gets shut down. Am I right in thinking that funds of around $250,000 dollars will get you one of these, not really a lot when you think of the costs of litigation.

At least with Nominet and .com's, that ain't going to happen. So using one of these .brands and building a brand on them, the users are taking a big risk. No doubt they'll get all the promises under the sun that .brands won't go bankrupt but what good are promises when the .brand has gone to the wall.

It may be worth investing short term because what will happen is they will load the bases with the best names being sold on each .ext then sell the thing and leave some other mug to carry the can. Then repeat over 10 times and rope in some more mugs overpaying for worthless names.

Acorn's archives are full of people that got suckered over .mobi .tel .co and every time someone else comes on and swears by almighty god that this time it's different and that the Messiah really is here.

-------

As Invincible says it's hard to tell long term what the structure of url's will be but phone numbers have been around for over 130 years and stayed reasonably the same... Sure we bookmark them against names now in our phones rather than remembering them but the principle of having an identifying mark has stuck and as with phone numbers I can't see anyway round that whilst companies spend billions on branding and being individual and this individual indicators.

I was looking at the apps a little while ago but even those need a url of some sort to be downloaded from, unless you want the monopoly of something like Apple's appstore taking a cut.. With the incoming of html5 those will be a thing of the past on phones shortly too.

atlas
13-06-12, 02:31 AM
Thanks Graeme, some great points!

Good point re .legal and .justice, etc.

Yes, I got burned badly on, of all things... .asia! Hardly hear about those nowadays.

ICANN requires the Registries to have 3 years working capital... so that should kick any financial problems down the road. I wouldn't be surprised if competing registry providers sue each other just to raise the cost of business for less well funded competitors.

Edwin
13-06-12, 12:45 PM
I believe that the only people who will make money from the new GTLDs are:

A) ICANN (hand over fist)

B) (some of) the Registries - time will tell if they all lure enough punters to turn a profit on their $400K-$500K investment (including 3 years working capital, setup and ICANN fees that's about the magnitude of the investment). If they charge $50-100 a year (which many of them may) it doesn't take many registrations to go into the black.

C) A handful of fast-movers at some of the more "desirable" new GTLD who can buy and flip before the hype dies down (and IF the registry even operates first-come-first-served and hasn't retained the most commercial names for itself/its friends/auction which is by no means a given)

D) (a little down the road) holders of decent .com/.cctld domains when the hype dies down and the excitement fades and end-users realise that a .something is as bad or worse than a .biz, .info etc. all of which they have been able to buy for a decade yet have never really got enthusiastic about, and it's finally and incontrovertibly clear that said .com/.cctld domains are the only real game in town.

E) IDN domain holders, if Verisign manages to get the IDN versions of .com/.net in key languages (since they have indicated some kind of grandfathering process giving first dibs to the holders of the equivalent .com/.net domains)

Even taking A) through E) into account, I don't believe that ANY of the new GTLDs will be a "success" in the sense that they will remain a constant unknown and source of head-scratching at best to 99.99%+ of the global web population. But if you take the extremely narrow, blinkered view that "ANYTHING that makes money for ANYBODY in ANY way is a success" then yes, they might be described as a success.

Mojoco
13-06-12, 12:53 PM
The numbers certainly add up for ICANN

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) said it had received 884 requests for new suffixes from the US, out of a total of 1,930.


$185,000 x 1,930 !

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18418076

aZooZa
13-06-12, 01:35 PM
I'll eat my hat if it's FCFS - the primes will be held back...

Edwin
13-06-12, 01:40 PM
E) Looks better and better, Verisign has a whole bunch of uncontested IDN extensions equivalent to .com in many languages
http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/application-results/strings-1200utc-13jun12-en

Mojoco
13-06-12, 01:42 PM
ICANN are revealing info live now....

http://www.icann.org/en/news/press/kits/reveal-day-video-13jun12-en.htm

atlas
29-06-12, 12:33 AM
Frank Schilling says (emphasis mine):


.COM has taken root a long time ago. I think that this is it’s high-water mark. Every major brand will have it’s own TLD in a decade. .com is great today because the brands reinforce it. It remains to be seen if that will continue in a .ANYTHING world. I think this has the potential to be a defining moment online, not a flash in the pan. .COM will indeed always be the king of TLDs, in an SLD world – but it will be marginalized on the whole by every new string that gets delegated.

http://domainnamesales.com/sevenmile/2012-06/lady-gaga-and-new-tlds-why-google-has-assured-their-future/

Quite a change from what he has said in the past. Why has he changed his view?


I have “Flipped” my view because this is different. We don’t live with 24 sh*tty .com alternatives anymore. There are going to be thousands of great ones. And all those people will be pushing in this direction. You can’t fight the tide.

He emphasizes his point later:


I think com is going to be king SLD but it’ll get marginalized over time

and:


I think this round of new TLDs will bring subsequent rounds and change things for the value of dot com in as-yet unforeseen ways. Prices may inch up from here but they will not go up as fast on a percentage as new TLD-slds will

What do you think of this?

GreyWing
29-06-12, 01:29 AM
Hi Jeff,

Seen it earlier and had a chuckle, wrote about it on the blog on that.co.uk (http://www.that.co.uk/that-blog/our-view-of-the-new-anything.html)

The guy should be ashamed in my opinion, ramping up sales of .anythings with more bubbles.

atlas
05-07-12, 04:24 PM
Graeme - I thought a lot about what you wrote. It is certainly what I thought until I read Frank Schilling's post. I've always respected Frank Schilling and take what he says seriously. However, after a lot of consideration, I can't help feeling he is being somewhat dishonest - either now or in the past. Perhaps he talked up .com and talked down alt extensions in the past so he could apply for the alt extensions with less competition. Or perhaps he's talking .com down now so that his alt extensions succeed. Either way, I have to say my opinion of him has gone down dramatically.

The more I think about it, the more I think that the new tlds are just .mobi all over again, in much much larger proportions. .mobi also had the backing of a lot of big, big companies.

However, one thing that Frank says does somewhat ring true with me - perhaps we have seen the highwater in .com values. Not to say it is a bad investment - but there is something to the fact that with a lot of competitors coming to the market, each one will somewhat chip away at .com values. Take brandables for example. If you are going to spend a lot of money branding a domain, is it really going to hurt you to brand an alt extension, especially in a world where consumers are used to alt extensions? I don't know the answer to that, but I think it somewhat puts the brakes on increases in .com prices of brandables. (There are also other reasons I believe this may be true that have nothing to do with the new extensions, such as Google eating its own SERPs, and economic reasons)

Also, in all of this, we're always talking about the effects on .com values. The effects on cctlds such as .co.uk seem to me to be a bit more difficult to assess. Certainly here in Canada I think a lot of companies go with .ca because the .com is taken or too expensive. With new extensions available, the calculus is somewhat different, and not necessarily easy to work out.

GreyWing
05-07-12, 09:53 PM
Hi Jeff,

To be honest even though I wrote what I wrote I didn't know that Frank had bought loads of .anything's. I thought he might make a few quid buying domain names on the ext's of others. Paul read my article that night and told me how far he dipped his toe in the water on this one and that he is actually registering about 50 extensions, not just the names.

When I heard that it kind of confirmed it all of what I was thinking.

With regards putting the brakes on the .com, I think that .com sales will slow down a bit but mostly because .com owners start to ask huge amounts for them and buyers simply don't have the funds available.

Tough one though as I don't know the .com's but one big thing I am sure of is that some of these .ext's will go bust shortly and if someone has branded one up with huge amount of funds, they'd lose them all when the .ext goes offline. I think that is what will keep the value in .com's (the security).

getmein
06-07-12, 10:02 AM
I think there is a huge difference between the .brand and .generic applications. If any of the early .brands appear to be successful then I think we'll see a rush from other large brands to also inhabit the space. For them, the cost to participate as a % of their overall marketing spend will be small. This market is probably limited to the worlds largest couple of thousand companies and I think it's fanciful to think that all of them will want to participate. Nonetheless, I can see why some large consumer facing brands like Gucci might have some interest in the 'authority' aspect of a .brand.

For the .generic extensions I just don't see how the owners of some of the more niche registry's can hope to gain enough traction to make them successful. As you say the danger is, that the registrys would most likely run out of money and then fold. What's the incentive for another registry to take over a failing registry? None. Added to which, the value of many generic terms is in the long tail. Terms without huge search volumes, which could never support a .widget/service which will still be best served by the .com/.uk.

As for Frank - he knows better than most - that the best way to make money in this business is either with a time machine or a crystal ball. Given how heavily invested he is in the domain business, punting on .generic represents a decent hedge (perhaps he's raised a decent chunk of other peoples money?) for his huge domain portfolio.

rob
08-07-12, 07:58 PM
To be honest even though I wrote what I wrote I didn't know that Frank had bought loads of .anything's. I thought he might make a few quid buying domain names on the ext's of others. Paul read my article that night and told me how far he dipped his toe in the water on this one and that he is actually registering about 50 extensions, not just the names.


Interesting for sure and worth a dig!

Some may not be sustainable, but others maybe. Lots to get burnt :(

GreyWing
08-07-12, 09:34 PM
I think it just needs one to go mate before the questions start to get asked, once one goes it might start to become a self fulfilling prophecy where stable extensions get tipped over the edge.

I think to make it sustainable they would need to be done like Frank has done, multiple extensions run by the same company to stand any chance of using economies of scale to their model. On the other hand, if it is one big ponzi scheme then 50 extensions going offline could send the established extensions sky-rocketing in value.