A story posted today on SBS.com.au – Claims US Firms Drop .com for new .GTLDs – This story can’t be further from the truth!
While yes many companies are beginning to adopt new GTLD domain names for marketing – I don’t know of any US company that has publicly said they are Dropping there DOT COM for new Dot GTLD – Do you?
As I have stated before .GTLD have a place in the market, they are here to stay and some will be massively successful and some won’t. Yes they will become more mainstream and we shall see them being used more often but I would say that not many companies at this point are dropping their Dot Com for Dot GTLD…
Maybe start-ups can’t get the Dot Com and will use a GTLD… Maybe but lets look at TechCrunch / CrunchBase and how many start ups are using Dot GTLD? Mainly they are launching their new sites on Dot Com or local CCTLD’s.
Marketing Campaigns are something where Dot GTLD can and will be used successfully but we all know about O.co and how that turned out. A company who I think is making a real mess of their marketing of what could become a new .GTLD but hasn’t launched is Booking BV who owns Booking.com – There adverts are always talking about “Booking.com, Booking.Yeah” Dot Yeah doesn’t even exist – They were smart enough to get BookingYeah.com but companies need to be careful with how they spend their Ad Campaigns on new Dot GTLD’s – Read this post about Booking.Com – Booking.Yeah.
I am not knocking Dot GTLD – I am just saying I don’t believe they will ever take over from Dot Com… Vegas.Com will still always exist, Google.com wont change to internet.Google – It just won’t happen Dot Com is here for a long time to come.
Here is the article below.
Did the website address you just went to really end with “.vegas” instead of “.com”?
It’s not a mistake. Companies, organisations and people are starting to forsake the familiar “.com” and “.org” internet address suffixes, using instead hundreds of new ones like “.legal,” “.restaurant,” “.solutions,” “.movie” and “.nyc” that have been coming on the market since early 2014.
Some US companies have started using suffixes that previously were used in other countries or territories, such as Puerto Rico’s “.pr.” Others are catching up to a handful like “.jobs” and “.travel” that became available a decade ago.
Known to some as not-coms, the suffixes give companies a chance to get website addresses, known as domains, that include their names. Many have tried to get a “.com” domain, only to find someone else already had it.
They’re also used as a marketing tool, helping an organisation or business show the public what they’re about. The suffixes are eye-catching and trendy, especially with tech-savvy internet users. Some not-com addresses redirect to addresses with suffixes like “.com” or “.co.”
“People are much more attuned to all the quirky names out there,” says Heddi Cundle, whose online travel gift card company, myTab, uses “.travel” in its domain.
Expect to see more of them after Google’s announcement last week that its new parent company, Alphabet, will have a website address of abc.xyz.
“Google’s action shifts not-coms from an interesting option to the ‘new normal’,” says Jeff Davidoff, chief marketing officer of Donuts Inc, a company that owns some of the new suffixes.
The suffixes have been approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the agency that oversees online addresses. Businesses, organisations and individuals can buy a domain from brokers known as domain registrars. These brokers, in turn, get the names from suffix wholesalers like Donuts, known as registries.
More than six million domains using the new suffixes have been registered, says Mike McLaughlin, a senior vice president at GoDaddy Inc, a company that sells domains to the public. There are an estimated 150 million “.com” domains in use.
“When somebody has a kernel of an idea, one of the very first things they do is (check on a name’s availability) to see if they can capture the essence of their idea in a name,” McLaughlin says.
While many of the companies using the new suffixes are start-ups, established companies are also adopting not-coms.
And some huge companies are getting their own suffixes, including the international bank Barclays, which has “.barclays,” and delivery company FedEx, which is working on getting “.fedex.” Big corporations apply for suffixes with their own brands to be able to control how they’re used.
TOP 10 NEW INTERNET DOMAIN SUFFIXES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER:
1 .agency
2 .email
3 .expert
4 .fitness
5 .guru
6 .media
7 .photography
8 .services
9 .solutions
10 .today
Source: Donuts Inc, a domain seller