This is what really made it distasteful to invest in nTLDs.
Far more than that, Biggie,
What do you mean John?
We will see more like it.
.BUZZ tried to sell and had no takers.
That's pretty good.
Yeah .NYC is a strong geo-brand ihmo.
You see this when looking at SpamHaus.
It seems .CLUB is the only one truly did well but idk.
They don't need domain investors!
What happened with .EU?
Would be nice to see .US be successful.
Quite a few more already. Some of them have been picked up by portfolio operators. This kind of thing makes a non-viable small gTLD commercially viable as part of a portfolio as the marketing budget is bigger. The .BUZZ would have been a good gTLD if the demand for new gTLDs hadn't collapsed with the end of large-scale Domain Tasting in 2008/2009.
The thing with a geo-brand is that the people have to identify with the region and it has to be a big enough market. New York is an amazing brand in this respect and it has a large enough population. These geo-brands are never going to equal .COM or the local ccTLD in terms of sales and volume.
It was very well marketed but it became partially dependent on discounted registrations to keep the volume up. That's a very tricky thing to get right because the deeper the discount, the lower the renewal rate. It also attracts the wrong kind of registration activity (spam/malware etc) that can cause big problems for the registry.
They do but not in the way people think. Ever since .MOBI was launched, the premium domain names have been held back for auction by the registry so it is not exactly a level playing field. With a level playing field, there's land rush for good domain names when a new TLD launches and that creates interest and activity. The ICANN rules were changed so that registries could own shares in registrars (before the 2012 round launched). Fastforward to the launch of the new gTLDs and people found that registry owned registrars had reserved the "premium" domain names. No land rush. No interest. No development. Few registrations. Some of the problem was down to new gTLD registry operators thinking like domainers rather than registry operators. Domainers drive interest in a new TLD but a new TLD needs all sorts of registrants (retail, personal, business, brand protection, speculative) and, more importantly, registrants who will develop working websites on their domain names. Take tens of thousands of domain names out of circulation and put them on PPC/sales landers and it gives people the impression that the TLD is a dead zone. People simply don't bother going back to sites on that TLD because they get the impression that there's nothing there.They don't need domain investors!
A massacre due to the cluelessness of the European Commission and its advisors. They hadn't a clue about what was happening with the domain name industry when they created the regulations. They chose a small ccTLD registry that had never operated a gTLD with multiple markets. It all went terribly wrong. (The story is in covered in the free pages of the Domnomics book on Amazon.) Since Domain Tasting was starting off in .COM/NET at the time, the .EU was the next big thing so a pile of front companies were set up in the EU to target high value keywords. People in the EU found it very difficult to get their domain names in .EU so they effectively abandoned it as a .COM competitor. The real damage followed. Those .EU portfolios registered via the front companies were dumped at a fraction of their cost in the few years after the landrush. Development in the ccTLD effectively stopped. The sale prices of .EU domain names collapsed and the European ccTLD registries saw their own registration volumes increase. Even today, the .EU is still less than 5% of the domain name footprint of most EU countries. (The Irish number is a bit strange and is a sideeffect of Brexit (the UK leaving the European Union). The Portuguese number is odd for a different reason as there has been a promotion of the .EU to new businesses in Portugal.
It would have been great to see Bob Parsons taking over the .US registry back in the day. He would have successfully marketed the ccTLD. The problem is that the .COM is the de facto US ccTLD and that makes it a very difficult proposition. What a ccTLD registry needs is the Mom and Pop registrations. They are the ones that give a ccTLD its credibility because they develop websites and people use those websites. Big brands like Google, Microsoft and Facebook don't matter in a ccTLD. People remember these brands rather than the extension.Would be nice to see .US be successful.
The best thing to happen to .CLUB is Clubhouse.
That would have been a great idea.
That's the truth.
I agree. I've seen .US be used by a lot of cannabis brands and dispensaries here.
Zoom.US should have rocketed .US domain growth ihmo.
I doubt .US will ever get there. Maybe in 100 years.
That's one side of the brands effect in action. People remember Zoom but not the extension (early market). With a mature market, people expect that the brand uses *their* TLD and will type their TLD extension after the brand. This is why people still add .com to a brand in the US market expecting it to be the website that they want.Zoom.US should have rocketed .US domain growth ihmo.
Even without Bob Parsons, Godaddy is a major player with a lot of shelf space. If it puts a TLD high on its checkout page or search options, that will boost the numbers of registrations. Not being on Godaddy excludes a TLD from much of the US market.
Renewal fee stability is a very important thing for TLDs. The last thing that the registrant wants is to be mugged for renewal fees building their business or website a TLD. It might take a while for the .US to get to the 50M mark but there is a shift away from gTLDs that could help. The other thing that the registry should not do is to repeat the discounted registrations fiasco that flooded the ccTLD. It will be a long road but having Godaddy's marketing power will help.I like .US domains renewal prices haven't been raised and are reasonable at most registrars.
I doubt .US will ever get there. Maybe in 100 years.
This happens much more than people realize.
That's true and I think this seriously hurt UNR domain extensions.
Agreed and I still remember what Unitegistry did hiking prices.
That was, ironically, the point at which Frank Schilling stopped thinking like a domainer and started thinking like a registry operator. However, it was poorly implemented and there should have been better terms for those who had registered domain names.
Her heart is in the right place but even in retrospect there's a lack of awareness of how rapidly the domain name industry was changing even then. The switch from gTLDs to ccTLDs started in the mid-2000s and, like a lot of ICANN people from that time, she seems almost completely focused on the US market. Rick Schwartz's analysis was far more accurate.
It was the lack of awareness that was the problem. What happened in the mid-2000s was that large-scale Domain Tasting created a very real shortage of good dropping domain names. Some gTLDs had the entire day's drop tasted. That created a false demand. So rather than focusing on the gTLDs, people began to focus on their local ccTLDs which had been relatively ignored until then.While she is American.
After 2009, it was mainly the registries, registrars and ICANN that were pushing the whole new gTLDs idea.There were some valid arguments for a few geo gTLDs. The public had largely moved on and the domain name industry had changed. The disconnect between the world of ICANN and that of reality was visible with ICANN's "projections" for the number of new gTLD domain names that it thought would be registered in the first year. It initially projected 15 million. The problem was that the demand for many of these new gTLDs had disappeared in 2009 because of the artificial shortage created by Domain Tasting and ICANN's lack of action on tackling that problem.That nobody asked or wanted new gTLDs?
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