App, Home, Inc most sought after domain extensions
To be totally honest, I do not really understand the rush to register that many new domain extensions.
You may have heard previously that companies and organizations with deep enough pockets were allowed to submit new gTLD (generic Top Level Domain) applications.
Basically any company or organization qualifying could submit an application for a new top level domain that they wanted to gain control over. In the end, 1931 applications were recorded of which many were for the same extensions.
The most sought after top level domain extensions were app, home and inc with eleven companies each submitting their application for them, followed by many other popular terms such as art, baby or blog. You could now say that top level extensions with three or four characters might make sense for some companies and organizations; the bulk of applications however uses more characters.
Think about top level domains like basketball, frontdoor or yellowpages for instance, which could lead to urls growing in size. Would you prefer to go to www.nba.com, or to www.nba.basketball?
You also find some strange domain extensions in the listing like bananarepublic, horse, or pamperedchef. I personally can't see myself visiting a website linked to any of those new extensions. What I do not understand is why companies seem so intent to register these new extensions. It may make sense for some as I said earlier, but the longer ones? Or companies that register multiple domain extensions?
According to the ICANN, the new gTLDS were introduced to "increase competition and choice" , and while it is certainly true that we may see an increase in popular domain names with different extension as a result of this new landrush, I fail to see the relevancy of those new extensions.
And even if it makes sense from a business perspective, one would still need to build trust and convince users to visit those domains on new top level domain extensions.
What's your take on the new gTLD landrush? If you could and had the funds, would you apply for a new gTLD? If so, which would it be and why?
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Land grab is a nice way of putting this, but it’s not really accurate. It’s more akin to Christopher Columbus coming home and bragging about all this awesome new territory that nobody else even knew or cared about.
Now imagine that ol’ Chris didnt’ find this land he just decided to make up the whole concept of it, and still managed to sell a continents worth of “imaginary” land.
Only in this case nobody will ever find out it was created from nothing by and organization that has proven to not be reliable or believable and yet and paying for nothing does seem to be the new corporate paradigm. ICANN I salute you.
Just a head’s up – I think you mean “sought-after”?
I knew I should have looked this up, had a feeling. Thanks and corrected.
The list of applications has been leaked by mistake.