Making the general public aware of new TLDs is going to be crucial for gTLD registries to become profitable. For many of these companies, educating consumers starts at the registrar level, as small business owners may opt to register a shorter gTLD as opposed to a longer tail, hyphenated, abbreviated, or some other type of .com domain name that is available to registrants today.
eNom has been one of the more active domain registrars promoting new gTLDs to its customers. The company has taken steps to make them aware of the new TLDs that are expected to be introduced in the next year or so. The company has a prominent link to its new TLD section on the top menu in yellow.
Yesterday, eNom posted a video called “An Introduction to New TLDs,” which explains what they are and why a small business would want one. eNom’s founder, Paul Stahura, is Co-Founder and CEO of Donuts, a company that applied for 307 new TLD. My assumption is that Donuts and eNom will work together to sell gTLD domain names to eNom clients, and the first step is educating them.
It’s always interesting to see how domain industry companies market their products to clients. The introduction of gTLD domain names is going to shake things up and will be fun to follow.
As owner of ovr 200 GTLD business services related names I can report that according to my traffic stats poeple and businesses are not showing increased interest in GTLD services yet. Let’s see how that mood changes after December 17th and as companies like eNom continue to push GTLD education.
Some days mostly due to ICANN inconsistencies and actions and missteps I wonder where the GTLD effort is going. I keep reminding myself of the tremendous dollars already on the table and that puts thing back into perspective
“Making the general public aware of new TLDs is going to be crucial for gTLD registries to become profitable.”
HA! Yeah, good luck with that.
Face it, the public only wants .COM’s.
Anyone who registers anything other than that is an absolute fool.
Do you think if Google ranks gTLDs equally to .com names it will have an impact on small business adoption of gTLDs?
@elliot .. We have seen with godaddy doing that with .co where it had replaced .com with .co but that didn’t help so much ..
Maybe not in the aftermarket, but there were over a million registered. Not sure how many there are registered now.
Good question Elliot, I think that the allure and benefits of top search rankings would certainly drive interest.
Here is another good questions related to this GTLD rollout.
Which was or will be more difficult? Introducing the .com or introducing the GTLD to market?
While Iwas certainly there in the mid 90s when things started cooking on the net Ihonestly can’t remember. Maybe some of your readers can opine.
BTW I would advise that earlier commentor to temper their opinion. Nothing is easy to predict with certainty in this uncertain world IMO.
While I am well invested in the GTLD movement I am taking a wait and see attitude at the same time.
I was talking to someone about the meet.me name and they kept saying meetme.com. I think people are conditioned to put the .com at the end no matter what. If someone owns the .whatever they’re going to end up loosing traffic to the .com if they don’t own it as well. Should be interesting to see how this all plays out.
That is very true right now, but if companies begin using gTLDs then consumers will recognize. It’s only the beginning and in time we will know if consumers change habits.
How many times have you dialed 1-800 when you were suppose to dial 1-877? If that’s any bit of an indication, gTLD adoption is going to take a while.