Home.Barclays: “Is This the Tipping Point?”

Back in May, Barclays announced that it would be moving to a .Barclays domain name from .com “[i]n a move aimed at streamlining customer experience.” It looks like the company made the change very recently, and the financial services company website home page is now found on Home.Barclays.

If you visit Google this morning and perform a search for “Barclays,” the Barclays.com url is still the primary domain name indexed for Barclays’ website. When you click the link, you are redirected to the website found on Home.Barclays. I think this will likely be updated very soon, perhaps even today.

This is a big change for the company and is welcome news for people active in the new gTLD space. In a tweet this morning mentioning this change, Christopher Hofman Laursen asked, “Is this the tipping point for the new gTLDs?”

The company does not seem to have created some potential error domain names on the .Barclays new gTLD extension. If someone accidentally types in www.Barclays, they are taken to an ISP error page. In addition, typing in home.barclays.com didn’t work for me either. I doubt anyone would type that in right now, but at some point when people start using Home.Barclays regularly and begin to type it in by hand, these might become common errors and should be addressed.

Many Google-indexed Barclays.com pages are not redirecting to .Barclays pages yet. For instance, the Investment Bank website is still found at InvestmentBank.Barclays.com and is not yet redirected. There are many pages similar to that which can be found by doing a site:Barclays.com search on Google. Navigating to pages within the Home.Barclays website shows that some pages are already moved to the Home.Barclays website while others are still redirecting to the .com. For instance, if you hover over the Press Releases link, you can see the target is on the Home.Barclays url but the page that still loads for me is on the Barclays.com domain name. I am sure most of these issues will be ironed out soon.

This is certainly a big change from a well-respected brand, but it remains to be seen if the company will push forward and move all of its websites to Barclays-owned new gTLD domain names. It will be interesting to follow this develops over time.

In the meantime, do you think this is the tipping point for the new gTLD program and new gTLD domain names?

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
  1. This reminds me of when Overstock.com switched to Overstock.co and people said that was a tipping point for .com domains. They then switched back to .com because they realized they made a mistake.

    It still may be a tipping point for new gTLDs, and I am not saying it is a mistake, but gTLD fans should keep the Overstock debacle in mind.

  2. Would be interesting to see if everyone at Barclays switches to first.last@home.barclays, my company is a supplier to Barclays, and certainly doesn’t look like that is going to happen too soon.

    email is the core of so many registrations/authentications/directories, that it is perhaps a greater barrier to entry for gTLD’s than anything else.

  3. However the Barclays.co.uk version which is what everyone in the UK uses to access online banking and other services still does not redirect to home.barclays. Wether they will roll this out later or not. But whenever i access barclays services i always go to the co.uk version and I think the majority of us british do.

  4. The gTLDs give companies the ability to be 100% in control of their brand. All it takes is a handful of big corps to do this for many smaller ones to follow in their footsteps.

    I personally can’t see the new gTLDs and dotcom coexisting in the minds of consumers. Having some companies using a gTLD and some using a dotcom I would think would get confusing for consumers after a while.

    In the end I think if someone had a choice between either a gTLD or a dotcom then I think the gTLDs would win out. Especially considering that you can pick up an available gTLD rather easily for your business.

    I don’t like that their homepage has to be home.barclays. To me it doesn’t sound right. Can their homepage be just .barclays without anything on the left of the dot?

    These short domains are going to catch on like wildfire at some point. It just looks so clean and modern.

    • “The gTLDs give companies the ability to be 100% in control of their brand. All it takes is a handful of big corps to do this for many smaller ones to follow in their footsteps.”

      How do the smaller ones do this? Apply for their own .JohnsCandyShop new gTLD extension? The process is time consuming and expensive. Further, if John’s Candy Shop wants to go with .Johns, he is going to have to fight with all of the other Johns. He will also have to pay someone to manage the registry.

      At this point, the cost is burdensome.

      I think there’s a major difference between a brand new gTLD extension owned by the brand and a random new gTLD extension like .Shop, which doesn’t really solve the confusion issue.

  5. I’m not saying that the smaller companies would buy their own gTLD but they will follow the example of the larger ones and use a new gTLD.

    Every one fights against the new gTLDs but if they were at a more affordable price point with affordable renewal fees then everyone who reads this blog would be invested in them.

    Those that have massive amounts of dollars invested in the dotcom space will of course say that dotcom will always be king but I truly see new gTLDs will be the future of the internet at some point in time. Sooner than later.

    There can be only one Elliot.Silver and that would make it easy to market your brand and secure your brand. There may be a elliotsilver.net, elliotsilver.in, elliotsilver.tc, elliotsilver.biz etc……you get the drift but there can be only one Elliot.Silver and that is a very powerful thing to have control of.

    No more will you have to repeat the extension or have a consumer forget your extension. Did you say that was a .com or a .net? Was it a .me? I think he was British so maybe it’s a co.uk. I don’t know, I can’t remember!

    No matter what part of the world you are in your brand will be 100% your brand. No more using an extension that only pertains to a certain territory or country. The new gTLDs will be the only 100% truly universal extension.

    I still love dotcom but I put my glasses on and can finally see the future.

    • So Todd are you dumping all your brandable.coms ?

      You can’t pick up a great new gtld rather easily for your business. If I am a fashion brand and want Dress.Sexy, Frank Schilling is not selling that to me for $19.

      Dot Com also has mindshare, history and seo. New gtlds better hope they can coexist because I don’t think they want an either or choice. The extension the world knows no matter what language they speak, or up to 10,000 strings a decade from now. ICANN obviously will continue to roll these out, 2nd round, third round, etc…

      The new gtlds have their place for those who want to be different but I don’t think .com going anywhere, anytime soon. And another point on there can be several Elliot Silvers, if ElliotSilver.net can market and has a better product than Elliot.Silver he is going to win the day.

  6. There are a few flaws in your thinking first it would not be a universal brand silver is silver in English doesn’t mean silver in Spanish,Mandarin or French.

    Secondly there’s a big difference in controlling your own brand like Barclays and using a dot site as a small company. Is that dot site or dot website ? Dot pics or dot photo ? Oh thats right dot photos.

    • Excellent point about small cannot emulate big. I do believe brands are what will help dictate the pace for new gtld adoption, not someone using a .web or .guru. If .google becomes big then that can be a game changer, a small business is just using another extension, it is a world of difference from using your own brand. I don’t control .media. I can have a great website on Fantasy.Media and Donuts can change the game, Oh renewals now $1,000 a year for all one word .media names.

    • I understand what you mean but Silver is not the brand Elliot.Silver is the brand. It doesn’t matter what Silver means in any language because it just becomes part of the complete brand.

      The total brand would be what is on the left and right of the dot. Computer.Solutions, Blue.Agency, etc….there are many combinations with many extensions where the whole name is the brand and the dot is just there to represent it as an address.

  7. When you look at the English language, brand should be placed on the left side of the dot. In advertising, you want your brand name to go first, followed by whatever you want to promote. Example: Amazon News, Amazon Card, Amazon Club, and Amazon Apps. News.Amazon, Card.Amazon, Club.Amazon, and Apps.Amazon are simply not natural for consumers to remember.

  8. Brand vs. non-brand use is apples and oranges, both in reality and in the likely influence it would have on true gTLD adoption. In fact, brand TLDs are not even gTLD’s at all. The “g” in gTLD does not mean “general,” but “generic,” something which appears to be lost in the minds of many including those who push the idea that brand adoption could be some kind of “tipping point” What we have going here is also a kind of “fallacy of equivocation” in the use of the term “gTLD” to describe both kinds of TLDs to begin with without people realizing it.

    I believe that once people realize this is what is taking place in the larger conversation, there is no reason to think or be concerned that company brand adoption can trigger any kind of major game changing shift or “new normal” regarding true new gTLDs.

  9. So in summary, it has been a misnomer from the beginning for brand TLDs to be released and marketed under the banner “gTLD.” Brand TLDs are really a whole different kind – really “bTLDs” if you will – and have little to no bearing on adoption of new and different gTLDs vs. the already popular and familiar of the same (gTLD) kind.

    • Okay, looks like an anonymous troll like me may be able to lay claim to having invented the term “bTLD” for the industry now unless it can be proven otherwise. 🙂

    • I agree there is a big difference between brand TLD and non-brand TLDs, but the general public won’t really care about any of that in terms of their web surfing habits. What matters is if people get used to using alternative domains instead of .com domains. If for example .Google or .Barclays. becomes big, then it will make .shop or .silver much much more socially acceptable.

    • I had thought of adding a statement along those lines as well. All the “bTLDs” do is reinforce awareness that there has been some change to the status quo, and that now something more is allowed than what people have been used to seeing. They have already seen a degree of it before, though, with extensions like .me, .co, .io, etc. I do not believe seeing brand extensions is going to ignite any monumental game changing shift of desire or preference, however. So one needs to clarify what kind of “tipping point” one is talking about in a question like this. If all one is talking about is being used to seeing alternative extensions and finding them acceptable, then I would argue that is mostly a non-issue and is already in place in terms of general attitude even if not matched by awareness. The main novelty would be increasing variety, and none may necessarily become so popular in general that is displaces the dominance of the most popular original gTLDs, even if any specific niche exceptions become popular.

  10. I can not imagine anyone ever wanting to use a gtld, whether they are a small candy shoppe or a large global corporation. If you so badly want to go out of business, why not just give your customers the phone number of your competitor?

  11. Funny how they made up “home” because the honestly did not know what to put to the left of the dot BIG weakness of the new TLDs.

    Consumers now need to remember two words instead of one, whereas with .com it’s just assumed everyone is using it. They will need to spend more on branding to make it stick than using a .com — and that’s FOREVER not just initially.

  12. I was reading an article about .LA and noticed their homepage is http://www.la which I think is a smart move. There are many that only understand what a .com is but not what a new gtld is, so putting www instead of home or some other random word let’s people instantly know it is a URL. It makes sense when your brand is the right of the dot.

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