Morning Folks!!
So at the show last week I came to this thought and conclusion and I shared it with all: "DotCom is the Biggest and largest Franchise in the History of the World!" Actually in the history of mankind. Think about that, just don't react. There has never been anything like .com in history. So many belong to the special club. All the Fortune 10,000 for starters and 95% of all business on Main Street belong to this franchise. Most franchise owners are in North America but there are owners in every single town and city in the world. Many of them.
It is just going to be interesting to watch exactly how this franchise will be dethroned by the wishes of a few. Yes, those few are powerful but nowhere as powerful as the franchise that each of them are shareholders of. Let's see how many abandon their dotcom and relocate on .whatever. How many lead by example. My guess is that none will actually do that.
Rick Schwartz
Irfan
I agree with you, .com will continue to be the Headquarter of all top level extensions and successful site owners are less likely to change this address. Further, .com can be dethroned only when internet enters a dot-less era which is far from truth at the present times.
Jeff Schneider
Hello Rick,
The .COM psyche is so embedded in the mind of worldly consumers, that their automatic Pavlovian response, is to automatically without thinking, type in the .COM franchise.
On the flip side, they are very hesitant and leery, of typing in any suspicious, .whatsthis?
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
Jon
A huge elephant in the room is the value of email forwarding of something like shoes.com after .shoes launches. Say .shoes sells 10,000 .shoes domains and on average .shoes domain buyer uses it for 2 emails. So we have 20,000 email addresses in the format similar to bob@nyc.shoes.
As we all know, very healthy percentage of incoming emails to bob@nyc.shoes (that are not replies to existing emails) will be sent to bob@nyc.shoes.com.
At $20 per email forwarding per year, 20,000 email addresses is $400,000 per year in income for shoes.com.
And I think it would be very easy to make all these email forwarding sales. All you have to do is to set up complimentary forwarding from bob@nyc.shoes.com for a while to educate bob@nyc.shoes about all the emails he is missing out on.
UFO
@jon
Great thinking,.com should reverse the ‘scaremongering’ and make the new TLD owners are aware of traffic they are missing. However, it would be MORE profitable for the .com owner to allow the new TLD to just implode with all traffic and business ending up on their front door.
One thing though in terms of UDRP etc you might want to have proper in use of shoes.com and have all the subdomains set up with landing pages BEFORE these new TLDs are won/owner and delegated.
You need to realise that ICANN are judge jury and defendant on their new TLDs.
********
In Terms of .com, the take up of .com is so high that it is clearly the standardised URL for commerce on the internet. The takeup must be high 90s% for international and US businesses.
The new TLDs promote the concept that new businesses will adopt the new TLDs and as they grow they will promote the new TLDs and over time they will gain market share and weaken the standardised .com. The more logical argument is that these small businesses will grow over time and then MIGRATE onto the .com for credibility purposes and to show they are indeed a REPUTABLE and KEY PLAYER. I see .com like the way I see the language English…. and you can say anything you want about evolving BRIC nations but the fact is that a standard language is needed and that language is English.. it isn’t going to change.
AlanR
I was thinking about that a while back too, Rick. I would say that when it comes to brands, we see, hear and say dotcom more in a day, way more than all other brands combined. It is everywhere and has been burnt into our minds as the extension that most serious business people pick to brand their company. At least in America that is but I see it catching ground in most countries around the world as well. Of all extensions out there, no other can claim that it is recognized by more people around the world than any other extension, like dotcom can! It is truly becoming the universal extension of choice if not already.