Biggest expansion of Internet Domain Names in 40 years starts new Land grab

Writing about web page http://www.icann.org/

A huge expansion of the domain names available on the internet from next year has been approved by ICANN.

The biggest change will be the introduction of non-roman characters for the 4.5 billion people who do not use our letters. This will take some time to sort but Russia, China and some others will be fast tracked.

Back in the English speaking world the land grab will start from Q2 next year. For a cost in the “low six figures of dollars” the wealthy, cities & speculators can apply for anything that is legal & decent. So Bill might try for .gates and Victoria may get .beckham. Big corporations might as well get their brand; search.google etc.

The real action will be budding domain registrants who hope to sell to many businesses with a regular strong income for their names. The most quoted has been .hotel but .music .movie .photo & .party could be early goldfields. The risk for speculators lies in our language’s diversity, with many synonyms and its rapid evolution. Will .health win over .medical? Will financial businesses need .bank, .credit and .finance? Will we need .birmingham for visitors to supplement .brum? Will it be .curry or .indian?

This spells the end of smaller countries exploiting the older two letter country codes as I touched on in the CCM Blog .

I feel sure that someone will think that the dreaded triple s of .solutions, .systems & .services will sell. They will be right but they will be selling management zombie terms; designed to be forgotten.

If one of your businesses main keywords is offered, especially if it is already in your brand (at the end is perfect) then consider buying.
If there is a plethora of choice then do your homework and test. You should test using £5 .co.uk domains before spending big on the new names.

My test results over two years have consistently shown that .co.uk will outperform .com for UK customers. This week I identified a local service market where this was not true, the .com won by 30%!

Scientific split-testing can take the guesswork out of web-marketing as I touched on in this post and in more depth in this article in ‘The Marketing Leaders’.
Sensing customers with pay-per-click advertising

Robert McGonigle : 27 Jun 2008 17:52 |  Tags: Domain Names Icann Split Testing Tld Tlds Web Marketing |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem