Domain Names,  General

Delusional Dreams of Fantastic Brands for Cheap!

“I can’t wait to register web.site” says the title over at HybridDomainer.com, going on to describe an utopian scenario envisaged by the two developers of registering web.site for $10.

They were of course referring to the newgTLD program of ICANN currently has underway.

Good luck with that buddy.

You’re completely delusional if you think you’re going to hand register great brands for $10.

Not going to happen by a long shot.

The only difference in the newgtlds will be that the registry will be licking the premium cream instead of domain investors.

Some domain investors might get good brands ‘pre release’ and through other ‘inside track’ investments, but the average joe is still going to have to slug it out to get good brands from an extension and this will be true for most extensions.

Here’s what going to happen for most top keywords in the generic extensions:

  1. The registry will ‘reserve’ top brands for auctions.
  2. Industry investors will get a pick of top generic domains as a ‘pre-launch’ deal.
  3. The Sunrise registration phase.
  4. The Landrush registration phase.
  5. Then will come the $10 for a domain stage.

It’s entirely unlikely that by the time you come stage 5 you’ll find anything that you really MUST have.

Be prepared to get in first, whichever tack suits you best, if you really have to have top domains in newgtlds too, it’s not going to be a cake walk!

Do you think you could get top domains without any effort, just because there are 1000s of new extensions?

Samit Madan is an advertising professional with almost three decades of experience. He's known as the MediaWizard due to his expertise in advertising & marketing. He currently heads MediaWiz, a leading Media Company.

7 Comments

  • Phillip

    I’m thinking of investing £100,000 into new extensions but am not sure which ones to invest in. Could you recommend someone who could help me with this or a service that would? Nice blog by the way, thanks for taking the time to share all this information.

  • Panama

    There are currently 22 generic top-level domains, including .com, .org and .net, and things are about to get dramatically more complicated. ICANN this week revealed the 1,930 applicants for these new gTLDs, bidding for which started at the bargain basement price of $185,000. The ICANN list of applicants contains the usual suspects, Google alone submitting applications for 100 different gTLDs via the company’s Charleston Road Registry domain name subsidiary. Amazon also had a significant number of applications — 76 to be precise — many of them gunning for the same gTLDs as Google (.cloud, .mail, and .app). ICANN says they company will now review the applications to ensure they don’t violate trademarks or threaten the “security and stability” of the Internet by being too similar to existing URLs. Many critics believe the move is simply a move to cash in on companies that are forced into defensively registering gTLDs to keep pace with competitors — or to prevent critics from setting up websites that could harm product brands. You’ll get to see the result of the effort early next year when the first of these domains are expected to go live.