Morning Folks!!
Here are 4 reasons why .brand will not replace brand.com in the foreseeable future. This was an email sent to me today by
Guoliang "George" Hong and I think it is very insightful.
1. Setup time.
It takes a few minutes to register a .com domain. It takes years/months to get
.brand application approved by ICANN. In the future the approval time period
will be shortened, but it would be still easier to use the brand.com they already
owned or register a new .com
2. Cost and efforts
It costs 6 figure and lots of efforts to apply for .brand; it costs money to
maintain and operate .brand every year. The costs and efforts will be less in the future,
but they will never match the $10 yearly fee for .com
3. Usability
To use .brand, people need to remember two strings. Leftofthedot and brand
To use brand.com, people just need to remember one string: brand; .com is
already embedded in people’s mind.
2 VS 1, human beings are lazy, Simple is better. Less is more.
4. Confusion caused by Left of the DOT
.brand owners are creative mind owners, which means that their left of dot's will have
tons of varieties. Tv.CBS, news.espn, drink.coke, enjoy.pepsi. The endless left of dot's will confuse users.
Also assuming that CBS is running tv.cbs and abc didn’t even apply for .abc.
When people type in tv.abc, they got an error. The next time they will think twice about typing in tv.cbs.
Thank you George! See you tomorrow!Rick Schwartz
NEIL
Rick, Good morning, there is a secret purpose-surprise for this TRAFFIC?
Shoot.me, please…
UFO
The real question that needs to be framed is ‘are these new TLDs good for domainer investments’.
If I was asked what is worth more, shop.com or .shop? I’d say the TLD .shop and that will be evidenced by the price they’ll pay at auction which will be higher than shop.com would ever achieve.
UFO
Amazon and all the rest will fight tooth and nail for .shop as in the case of Amazon it would allow all its ‘shops’ to have their own URL and thus indexing and traffic. They could have a distributive ecommerce model (like its shops as Avon type affiliates) rather than all parked on its site.
In the case of google et all. .shop provides the potential to gain thousands and thousands of shops as customers and cross/up sell them a whole bunch of hosting and other services.
I personally think .shop is easily the most valuable string/domain on the planet. If it went for +100 million I wouldn’t be surprised.
LSM
‘Academically’ (as opposed to ‘practically’) minded types grossly underestimate the influence inertia has on everything since they’re prone to confusing possibility and probability. They don’t understand that just because something is conceivable, even SENSIBLE, that doesn’t mean it’s likely to happen. The reason they still build stick-framed oceanfront homes in hurricane zones, the reason cars aren’t made out of carbon fiber, the reason we aren’t all flying around in jetpacks is because of the inertia of established commerce. Paradigms do shift and if this one is ever going to shift, opening up the right of the dot is what’s going to do it but how long does that take? If a guy is 30 and destined to die somewhere in his 70’s 80’s (no guarantees of that) , he has two generational cycles of life left to fuck around with but only one is useful presuming he can compound annually @ 15%. Guys already in their 50’s, 60’s? Whatever you aren’t taking right now is liquidation fodder for your heirs. ‘The future’ is for gamblers and suckers.
Scott Alliy
“The future’ is for gamblers and suckers.” This may be true… It is also true that “You can’t get in early, Later”. And the massive possibilities and inertia,massive spending, creative marketing, competition, consumer choices, services business opportunities set to happen are worth considering the investment risk vs. any downside for not acting early.
UFO
@LSM
Google with the likes of .shop could make a huge dent very quickly.
It could sight .shop in a cloud. You don’t ‘lease’ the URL you get the full package with everything all rolled up. Like ‘office’ cloud which is ultimately they want to provide as well. If they did it right they could stick all the .shop’s into one mega iMall and do all sorts of things inside google search and with their maps (Which is a massively underutilised piece of IP).
But, I actually don’t think google has what it takes to do this, they’ve been a massive clusterf*ck and if they were seriously travelling this path then why did they ditch checkout… because they prefer techie gadgets rather than building cashflows. Nb: Google / MSN / Yahoo all want more confusion because it means more SE usage.
Anyway, I still think .com will survive everything because while there can be slicing and dicing the large majority will sit on their .com
I think there#s serious money to be made but it will be with registries and large coroprates. Nothing worthwhile for the domainer. They just need to improve the quality of their holdings to ensure they don’t get caught up in the sliced and diced bits, like 3 word com’s that sit better as a 2 word on a new TLD.
UFO
Just in case you guys still can’t see the potential of .shop what if the TLD registry takes a % of sales going through the ‘platform’ that’s how Amazon works currently so it would be the same but delegated into .shop same with Google, rather than messing about with pay per click it could just take a % of sales and then drive those sales with its formidable backend. Some malls take a % of sales of the shops so all of this is true tried and tested, it just needs to be fully embedded into the ecommerce world, and .shop offers that new Greenfield site to build that great iMall.
Just think like a small shop, you can join .shop and be charged 10% of sales crossing its platform but you don’t pay for the platform and they do everything. eBay and Amazon are 11-15% which means the likes of Google could be in that space but with superior technology capability.
If I was in the .shop pool of applicants I’d be looking to sell my application to eBay if they’re not already in. Because, if anyone thinks they are going to beat the likes of Amazon, Google in a bidding war is just dreaming and going to lose their application monies.
I’m not sure if Amazon, Google, eBay have fully worked out how pivotal .shop could be for their ecommerce success over the next few decades. This is like owning the global high street of ecommerce. If they provide a sufficiently compelling package for shop owners then they’ll start pointing their .com’s at the .shop and jump on board.
LSM
“You can’t get in early, Later”
No, you cannot. Of course, most people who live by the mantra of ‘getting in early’ are crappy risk modelers, easily distracted by possibility at the expense of probability.
BullS
That why I am a DomainRacist…..where I discriminate non dot com or dot whatever.
I only welcome dot com species.
DomainRacist(s) is open to reg.
Dot com rules and that species is here to stay, pro-create and will live long forever and brings lots of prosperity.
George Hong
Good points. Some companies may point their .com to .shop and some don’t want to own .shop. However all companies will keep their .com domains. .com will always resolve while .shop may not. Once users figure this out, they will simple just type in the trusted and always reliable .com
UFO
@LSM
“You can’t get in early, Later” Correct, but as it stands you won’t be able to even get in early with these new TLDs because they won’t be underpriced or have a monopoly in the marketplace like .com had.
If these TLDs were such good value the registries would hold onto them themselves, they bascially cut the domainer out of the equation and want retail prices and/or development to drive their TLD, none of which domainers provide other than some registration fees they’ll be happy to collect on middling domain names that are fully priced.
UFO
@George
Don’t forget all these businesses I am talking about are small SME’s and the users will often use SE to find the shop, and with a permanent redirect .shop will show in the results. Couple that with bookmarks and SE taskpanel with last URL then that particular user gets trained and normalised with using .shop. You’re placing too much emphasis on direct navigation imho esp for small businesses.
I’ve had .com’s pointed at eBay shops to make it easier for previous shoppers to find my shop because eBay tries to make it as difficult as possible to build any form of proper branding.
In the US users might be more prone to direct navigation but here in the UK etc we have cctlds along with tld so search imho will be used more. Even I use search for the majority of second tier brands/businesses I know of because I cannot/will not try to remember them all. And your small business down the road is going to be in exactly that category.
Say with .shop it could do everything I’ve mentioned previously and google could power up its maps more so it also became a visual search more because local people know generally where local businesses roughly are.
In essence, there’s a whole bunch more to come than just direct navigation.
UFO
Ok, in a nutshell I envisage the future as such
.TLD for major brands and global businesses (In their exact match)
.Com for SME’s to large enterprises
.Shop etc for small businesses.
Note: .shop foregoes control but gains tech solutions and is a step up from the current Amazon / eBay shops as it allows branding. Com will be the mainstay of the majority of decent sized businesses that want brand control and independence. .TLD will be for those that want to be a tier above .com and have absolute control over their brand identity, they will still retain the .com but it is likely to fade over time.
I have thought of loads more, but I’ve given enough information away. Just imagine as Rick points out ‘needs, wants and desire’ and integrate that into the competitive framework of differentiation with constraining elements of tech to see the art of the possible.
Jeff Schneider
” If you want to limit your target audience geographically, by all means employ .whatevers. If you want to utilize the world wide webs Unlimited Marketing Potential, that Targets the masses, you must employ the .COMs Unlimited Target Market.” JAS- 10/17/13
P.S. The Larger the potential audience the Larger the potential Valuations.
KISS
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
Konstantinos Zournas
Rick,
think about emails too.
How would emails look like?
john.smith@drink.pepsi? john.smith@corp.pepsi? john.smith@email.pepsi?
Who is going to remember drink or corp or whatever? They will only remember pepsi and com.
Will they be redirecting all the old email addresses to the new ones? For how long?
Old habits die hard, if ever.
UFO
@Konstantinos,
I’ve worked in companies that have loads of email addresses. They use cctlds of various nations, the .com . 2 words on the .com a whole bunch of subsidiary acquisition email addresses and just a myriad of others. How do you know who and how to email? By looking on the company phone directory.
Most corporates DON’T want the general public knowing how to email directly to employees. It’s easy to spam the CEO if you know her/his email address is firstname.lastname@whatever.com
As has been mentioned some companies like the TLDs for internal mail which means they may not be able to email externally, maybe then just the .com or cctld will give that capability and help secure company IT systems further rather than manually tweaking individual email addresses.
Investor Dude
er…
GTLD = Great To Lose Dollars!
t
I’m trying to sum up my doubts and I just don’t see the benefits to the .brand or .whatever. These new tld’s are so self explanatory on there own it will severely limit its useful registrable variants to the left of the dot before it gets sloppy. Who’s going to register ‘New-Shoes.Shoes’ as apposed to ‘New-Shoes.Com’ when ‘New.Shoes’ is taken for example? Which means the only strings to the left of the dot worth branding will be these singular generic words like in my previous example, and we all know these will be the first to disappear, or likely withheld by the registrars themselves who payed ridiculous sums of money to win and reserve there .whatever. Its no wonder google sort after a dotless domain, other than ‘www’ nothing else fits..
So to summarize my incessant ramblings, there will be such a limited number of useful and applicable strings to the left of the dot that all of the niche tld’s have little to no chance of gaining enough registrations to support themselves, let alone make a profit. This is going to be a very expensive lesson.
Kassey
I can’t figure out why consumers want to switch from .com to .brand. What are the benefits? How big are the benefits that can motivate consumers to change their habit?