From a profiteering aspect this is absolutely huge. All the value of domains like “sex.com” absolutely plummets. That’s billions of dollars. Poof. And suddenly there’s an opportunity to make even more money getting in on the ground floor of a plain-english-word tld. I’m gonna register ‘.sucks’. As in “straightdope.sucks.” But keep in mind that I’m not registering “straightdope.sucks”, I’m registering the very ability to put anything before the letters “sucks.”
Only problem is that registration will be in the “6 figures.” But hell, this is a get-rich-quick opportunity of a lifetime. Until the DNS people think of something else to completely wipe out value.
A lot of business is generated on the ability to type in a URL and have it work. Take Best Buy for example. I, as an average non-savvy internet user, can just type in www.bestbuy.com and get to the site. But what if bestbuy.com was taken by some cheapie third-rate online shop that wouldn’t sell? Best Buy would need to use www.best-buy.com or www.bestbuyusa.com or something similar, and that requires more work to find.
Similarly, if you set up an anti-Best Buy site at bestbuy.sucks, and people know about the .sucks domain, you’re pretty certain to get a lot of traffic from people just typing in bestbuy.sucks. If you have to go with bestbuy.sux or bestbuy.tehsux, it’s not going to be nearly as easy to find your site, because fewer people are going to be familiar with the spelling sux.
Yes, there’s Google and other search engines, but this is effectively branding.
My impression is that blind typing is being used less and less, intelligent searching is being used more. With a proliferation of new domains blind typing will become less effective. I see this as killing the trend, not creating more valuable domain real estate.
I personally still use it. If it’s a major company, I’ll throw the name.com in there. If it hits, great. If not, then I’ll go searching. Obviously one person doesn’t define a trend, but still.
I agree with that. There’ll probably be a lot of domain name fraud immediately after this has been realized, with people registering TLDs with common misspellings – .cmo or what have you – with the names of well known companies, but I don’t think anybody will reap big bucks from that, or for a short time at best.
The porn industry will probably be at the forefront of that, but the whole thing will eventually falter, which we’ll then call the burst of the .cum bubble.
Hasn’t this been tested before, with the .BIZ domain? I remember it being touted as the Next Big Thing, but it disappeared.
It just added to the confusion, and I can’t see why a web site would want to confuse potential customers.
Suppose I want to check out the new model of my Toyota–should I go to toyota.com, or toyota.biz, or toyota.cars or toyota.jap or toyota.autos or toyota.toyota or…?
Where is the advantage for the Toyota corporation?
It’s the originals that leave the lasting impression. 888 and 877 are both toll-free, but the phrase is always “eight hundred number.” I imagine the same with be true of .com, and to lesser extent .org and .edu.
Get-rich-quick opportunities aren’t so good when you have to be already rich to take part in them.
I dunno - I guess something like this had to happen - if they’d just released a bunch of new, but standard TLDs, all that would happen is people/agencies who already have the .net and .com versions of something would end up buying the .whatever one too.
I don’t suppose any of it really matters though, because whatever we end up with, most of it will just be pointing at the same content already in existence somewhere else anyway.
Ahh… but those are usually the ones that work.
I think there’s three ways this all could go:
Domain parking. Ie, as was said, making bestbuy.sucks or even better bestbuy.cmo and waiting for people to accidentally type it in. I think people still make a lot of money on that, but I can see how that’s less the future.
Catering to established players with novelty TLDs. That’s what .biz was. That’s the suggestion that toyota won’t want toyota.cars. That makes a lot of sense, if you think of it in terms of this strategy, exactly. It’s just noise and not needed. There might be some value in “.cum” That’s a nice pun.
I think this is the big one: Thinking of domains in a new way where they’re memorable phrases unconstrained by an artificial three-letter suffix. If you have a company called “Bad Boys Inc.” you’ll want your website to be badboys.inc. If you have a website called AOL sucks, you’ll want its address to be aol.sucks. Personally I think the “.com” was great because you knew right away it was a web address. In the future you’ll have to say “This is a web address: badboys.inc” Yet no one will want to attach a meaningless thing at the end if they can avoid it.
The question: will scenario three, being so damn honest at heart, bring in money? I dunno. I think if you pick the right words, it will. But then you’ll need actual customers and a shiny registration website and etc etc etc
Another question: is there some other scenario, one that ain’t honest, that’ll rake in big dough. Probably .cmo will be a goldmine. But I think overall there may be fewer opportunities. But I really think I’m overlooking something.
And the final question: will they make any more? I mean this in terms of land. They don’t make it anymore. Land is simply a solid investment. .com domains seemed that way too. Until this plan showed up largely erasing the value of simple english word .com properties. Will something else like this happen again? Or will the TLDs’ value grow boundlessly as the internet matures further and further and no one bothers to invent a new addressing system.
That could be. That could be. The web is consolidating, cooling, shrinking. Would a ‘bestbuy.sucks’ domain even have any relevance? If you go to bestbuysucks.com there’s nothing there.
I believe the explanation that the $100,000 price is to deter wiseasses from gumming up the works to be legit, presuming that the goal itself, opening up new TLDs, is sound and reasonable, which I think has yet to be shown.
I can’t get too excited about this. I view it as just one more interim step that folks will get hot-and-bothered about for a few years but eventually will be met with a yawn.
I remember when small (or not so small) countries started marketing their country codes to people wanting to add special meaning to a web address (like .tv (Tuvalu) for TV stations or .pr (Puerto Rico) for a PR firm). I don’t hear a lot about anyone doing that much anymore (except for .tv) particularly after ICANN added more top-level domains back in (whenever it was) like .biz etc.
Now (as someone has pointed out) with ICANNs decision to let anyone register a TLD the value and usefullness of the current TLDs have been somewhat diminished.
But this too is just a passing phase, I think, because ultimately web addresses may look like I thought they might have been at the beginning.
Consider the Toyota corporation (as another poster already has): instead of “toyota.com”, “toyota.biz”, “toyota.jp” or some new addresses with custom TLDs like “toyota.celica”, “toyota.camry” etc., i think ultimately their web address will be simply “Toyota”.
All the other addresses will go by the wayside–you can’t make it any more basic or any easier to remember than “Toyota” or “McDonalds”!!
