Domain Name Strategy

[Discovery]

One topic I seldom see discussed here is that of domain name strategy.

Its understood that the speculation aspect of purchasing domain names can get out of hand, but building out a portfolio of relevant domain names makes good business sense.

.com is all used up.. so marketers are expanding into foriegn TLD's.

Recently .tv and today .me have become attractive tld's. In the past new TLD's had little value to a global marketplace, but now the internet has grown and these suggestive TLD's are earning a nice little niche that is carving out a bit of traffic from the .com market.

How do you view TLD's like .me or .tv - do you think they will gain traction?
Do they offer any revenue generating ability via adsense or pure organic ranking?

I personally have hedged my bets investing in names that are higly lucrative in the .com space. After all a couple grand is a small investment to get into the game and can easily be earned back over time with Adsense revenue.


Discovery

Soon to be at discovery.me :-)

[Gooner151078]

The biggest development in this field occuured on the 26th June when ICANN announced the new format for domain names. This will allow organisations to effectively register any word as a TLD. So for example, you could have Forums.SearchEngineWatch instead of Forums.searchenginewatch.com.

This could trigger a mad scramble for attractive domains, especially as this time around, domain parkign sites are much more cunning. Or it could fail in the same manner as .travel did.

[Discovery]

From what I have read of this, ICANN is not going to give free license to anyone to register any word as a TLD.

This would do far more that dilute the value of current TLD's it would take the very meaning out of a domain name and confuse the living crap out of Internet searchers.

What they are suggesting is that companies with legitimate branded, trademarked and or service marked names can apply to have that TM SM name be used as a TLD. The application process is not a simply nor inexpensive one.

I don't know where this idea is in the process, but I don't think it will every come into fruition.


Discovery