Dot com to dot love: How to use the web’s new domains to get noticed

Dot how, dot work, dot money, dot yoga – these are just a few of the new domain extensions launching in the next couple of months. And here’s a sample of the many generic top-level domains (gTLDs), as they’re technically called, that became available recently – dot buzz, dot cool, dot tips, dot beer, dot wtf,

Until just a little over a year ago, the internet was a serious place with only 22 gTLDs, like dot com, dot net, dot org, etc. Then the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit organization with multiple stakeholders that manages internet domains, threw it open because the old spaces were getting too crowded. Nearly 1,500 new domain extensions are in the process of being rolled out, and more may be added. From the dot com era, we have come to the dot anything era.

This creates new possibilities, especially for startups that want to get noticed quick with sexy domain extensions like dot mobile, dot app, or even dot sexy.

Apart from the novelty and cool factors, the new domain extensions may also create niche communities on the internet, such as the health food crowd converging on dot diet, fitness freaks working out at dot fitness, or businesses and people with a global outlook hanging out at – you guessed it – dot global. Millions of domain names with the new extensions have already got registered, and it’s snowballing as more gTLDs come online. So if you have a pet shop, you have to decide quickly if you want to be on dot shop or dot dog – probably both.

The internet is transforming right before our eyes and if we don’t hop on to the new bandwagon, it will just pass us by. We have seen how important hashtags and Twitter handles have become in developing a following or just getting noticed. The same thing is likely to happen with the new domain extensions.

A white paper just released by NetNames, a UK-headquartered domain name management firm, suggests that by 2020 these new gTLDs will fragment internet users into “communities of interest.” Domain name endings like dot sport, dot news, and dot holiday will create areas of the internet specific to different interests. This will also influence browser-based navigation because the descriptive nature of the new domain extensions make them easy to remember for internet users. NetNames research showed that 59 percent of internet users expected it to get easier to find their interests through domain extensions like dot art.

Geographic names in the new domain extensions also create possibilities which are more localized than the country domains like dot in (India), dot cn (China), or dot jp (Japan). For instance, one of the domain extensions which have just become available for pre-registration is dot ryuku for a chain of Japanese islands from Kyushu towards Taiwan, including the emerging startup hub of Okinawa which is also available as .okinawa. Other Japanese domain extensions in the pipeline include dot tokyo, dot osaka, dot kyoto, dot yokohama, and dot nagoya. Indian entrepreneurs, meanwhile, have to be content with .desi, as Indians in America like to call themselves (‘desi’ means countryman in several Indian languages). But only around 500 of the nearly 1,500 new gTLDs have come out, so Indian startups will look forward to some city-specific domain extensions which could help them to localize their appeal.

One of the hottest of the new domain extensions in India right now is dot cricket – it’s a wildly popular game in the country and the World Cup is starting on February 14.

How the new gTLDs will affect SEO and whether Google will tweak its algorithms for them is open to debate. But a vast majority of businesses (85 percent) surveyed by NetNames responded that they would revamp their digital marketing strategies.

This month the number of domain name registrations using the new extensions crossed the 4 million mark. That’s still a small number compared to the nearly nearly 300 million domain names overall on the internet. But what’s significant is that more than half the new registrations over the past year were on the new extensions. So the trend is clear and it can only snowball further from here. TLDWatch predicts that the number of registrations on gTLDs will cross 10 million by the end of this year.

As with all good things, there’s a downside too. Big brands now face a bigger headache in keeping track of spurious domain names tricking internet users, as in ibm.ventures or burberry.clothing or lufthansa.email.

See: India’s 47 million small businesses are mostly offline. That’s music to GoDaddy’s ears

This post Dot com to dot love: How to use the web’s new domains to get noticed appeared first on Tech in Asia.

Dot com to dot love: How to use the web’s new domains to get noticed