According to a report, celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck is heading to the ICANN meeting in Sydney to support his efforts to launch new gTLD’s and has several new extensions on his menu.
According to the report, he is a definite go with .Food and looking at .Wine and .Restaurant.
Having someone of Mr. Pucks statue and reputation behind any of these brand couldn’t hurt, but you have to wonder if the Food Network is going to let him take over the .food extension without a fight.
Likewise I would expect some company like Zagat to make a bid for an extension like .restaurant or OpenTable.com, the online reservation system that just went public a couple of months ago.
Its one thing if no one goes for an extension in your space, but once it becomes public knowledge that there is going to be a .food for example, aren’t others in the space almost compelled to make a run at it?
I think both .food and .restaurant has nice potential, not so sure about .wine though.
Wolfgang has released a video discussing the .food application and his plans for it
Why not ? … what’s next .car, .brakes, .garage …
lets do the entire Yellow Pages ICANN … at this rate ICANN might make more
money than Google.
All this is great news for search engines …
they will be needed more than ever to sort out the confusion.
.dumb
Shaun
There is one thing for sure, Puck is a very smart guy and a good businessman.
He built an empire from one restaurant.
If he see’s value in these extensions you shouldn’t discount it so quickly
Wolfgang’s going to learn a very expensive lesson. I’d rank this brilliant celebrity marketing strategy on par with DrKoop.com.
PS: Mike – if Wolfgang was that smart he’d pony up and buy Food.com instead of spending millions to gamble on popularizing a new TLD.
Michael
Food.com is owned by the Food Network so I don’t think there selling and I do think they will go for the .food extension as well
Frank Schilling is a very smart guy and good business man. He built a domain empire. Does that make him a great chef?
As for .restaurant, I don’t think that will fly. Most people can’t spell it (at least without a spell checker).
Thats true,
theres 2 words i always notice i make typo’s/missspels on,
restaurant – restaraunt
thanks – thnaks
that i notice of anyway 🙂
theres only going to be a few that make it, the rest will be like your .asia / .tel / .me , fun for a while, but not going to last.
the only 1 i’d look at would be .llc only if used correctly, getting it with your own llc startup.
gives it some credability,
Chris
The point is a Wolfgang is a very good businessman.
There are many great chefs in the world, but few have accomplished what that guy has.
Who cares if Frank can cook, the question is if Franks announced tomorrow he was going for 10 of these new extensions would your opinion on them change.
My guess is it would.
There are people I’ve meet in my life who have had great success in several different and distinct ventures and if they told me they liked a new deal, I would give strong consideration to it.
My point is if a very successful businessman see’s opportunity in something you should give it some consideration and not dismiss it so quickly
Dot
How many restaurants are there in the US, in the world?
20,000 in Manhattan alone.
The market is huge.
You can teach people how to spell.
Verizon is no easy word but people learned it.
David read my mind (quit that!)
He may knows how to cook and run a restaurant empire but what does he know about Domains? and it is a Domain thing not an internet thing.
Maybe food.com isnt for sale but he could but a ton of good names and do more with them than the mess he’s about to buy.
Yelp.com or Zagat.com were cheaper 🙂
Heck even Contests.com would have been better and run cooking contests from it 😛
Tim
I’m going to disagree with you and Michael here.
Just because he never been in the domain business before doesn’t mean he won’t be successful.
I’m sure the guy knew nothing about frozen foods or canned goods before he launched his line.
We always bitch about the lack of non-domainers in the business, yet when they decide to get involved, you guys jump on them as knowing nothing about it and peg them as destined to fail.
I think we should give more respect to those who have been successful and welcome such people into the domain business in whatever capacity they choice.
Good points Mike. I don’t say he shouldn’t try.
He should look over at you stock tickers though and ask why is Marchex at $3.59 and DBS at .14.
He has my blessings…
Then maybe we should be talking about Tom Kaplan and the like who run Wolfgang Puck Food Grp and come up with his great ideas that he then endorses with his name.
sorry to hit this again…
I would add, it will be better for Puck to have a positive experience with Domains than to be saying 3 years from now that he lost his ass.
Someone should invite him to a TRAFFIC show at the very least.
Yes, while we’re belaboring the point let me add a few more things, lol.
Tim
I don’t think Marchex or DBS are a good comparison.
Marchex is a large domain holder as is DBS which also is a registrar.
What Wolfgang would be is a registry, of which the only publicly traded one is VeriSign Inc.
The big question is why would it be better to own JoesItalianMeatballs.restaurant over JoesItalianMeatballs.com
Mike:
It’s David here, not Michael.
There may be 20,000 restaurants in Manhattan, but once again, look to dotTravel for a roadmap here. They had the exact same mindset (read their early PR)when they launched the dotTravel TLD. They claimed there were a gazillion travel agencies, CVBs and other travel organizations who were foaming at the mouth for their own industry TLD – and guess what? No one cared.
The bottom line is that the majority of businesses went tot dotCom by default. They didn’t really have a choice so they embraced it on their stationary, business cards and advertising. And now they’re going to change it all just for the sake of a new TLD? They won’t.
Is there some relationship you have with Puck ? because this slurping is over the top IMO. .restaurant ? If you are seriously saying that is a good extension WOW. Because he is a good businessman in food means nothing in another unrelated business. Plenty of people are good at one and suck at everything else. And if you think this is true then I do not know why you spend so much time going after ICANN they are giving the path for great businessmen to be great in a new area. If that’s a good idea then many businessmen will see value in just about every word .salon .beauty .pizza .gas .bar .club. .Restaurant is a good idea, I don’t even believe I just read this. Its a little over the top IMO.
MHB,
I agree with 100% of your assessment here.
To others,
Do not dismiss these GTLD’w so easily. It is not far fetched to say that many will do well and that .COM will still remain strong. Sure many GTLD’s will fail, but many others will not.
People with the business credibility and cache of Puck stand a good chance of succeeding.
Lets remember fellow domain investors and developers, Madison Ave, will look at this as their chance to make up for what they did not do the first time around. They will embrace GTLD’S and in turn, companies will put massive amounts of money behind them, the likes we have not ever seen.
Nobody is saying .com will not remain a force to be reckon with, but to assume the landscape will not change is naive.
Anyone who tells you that they know for sure how this will play out over the next 10 years is borderline delusional. The nature of everything is to evolve over the time and certainly the domain space is no exception.
Brian, marketing and warfare history agrees with Mr. Castello
… repositioning .COM as a secondary choice will be close to impossible.
Dot
Unfortunately I have no relationship with the guy, (especially no inheritance expectations) however, in the spirit of full disclosure I have eaten at Spago in Beverly Hills (I Hihgly recommend it) during both my trips to DomainFest and I had the opportunity of meeting him and shaking his hand.
Now back to the topic at hand, which are two separate issues.
Do I think its a good idea that ICANN allows hundreds or thousands of new extensions, no I don’t.
I’m strongly against it.
I will continue to urge ICANN to reject the new gTLD idea on the size and time frame they are proposing it.
However, this story is about one company looking to secure 1-3 spaces, if they are allowed.
So from the other side of the coin, if these extensions are going to be allowed, I think a .food extension supported by Wolfgang can be a money maker for the registry.
I do not think Wolfgang’s group’s .food extension should be viewed as failure before it gets out the gate, just because they have no domain experience going in.
Also in full disclosure, I see nothing wrong with trying a .food or a .wine. The easier to spell the better. I do think people have to be reconditioned to accept them and most likely at their primalest needs. That’s why I think .xxx will be the best extension to get people used to alternative gTLDs. Easy to spell, easy to remember. Pavlovian in every sense.
I can’t resist.
Looks like a good food fight in the making!
I’m in the camp that believes Mr. Puck’s making a big mistake . . . he’s just not grasping the monumental difficulty in launching these junk extensions.
That said, due to the spelling/length of word problems/drawbacks w/”restaurant,” I’ d go w/the short & classy .Dine instead.
. . . monumental difficulty in making financially successful/profitable these junk extensions.
Great answer Michael and I am with you on .food it was the .restaurant which one out of every two people mis spell that had me wondering, .food could make a lot of sense from someone like Puck’s experience.
“Someone should invite him to a TRAFFIC show at the very least.”
He’s at the ICANN meeting in Sydney right now.
Wolfgang had the chance to buy wine.com when it changed hands twice in the last ten years. Same with food.com before the Food Network got it a couple years back. Either he was too cheap or just missed out. Likely the latter. Still, any money he wants to “invest” in .whatever would be far better spent on trying to buy the .com version. If he “succeeds” with .food, he will be sending tons of traffic to food.com anyway. In sum, agree with most here, its a losing proposition, it does not matter how smart Puck may or may not be. .travel is a total bust and its a far better keyword than .food, .wine, .restaurant, etc.
You can’t say .travel is a total bust. Aside from .com, the second two extensions I see advertised on TV are .org and .tv. I was very surprised to see Ohio.TRAVEL advertised on my television screen a few weeks ago. Just like you can advertise any generic like hotels.com or you can advertise any silly made up word like ‘bing’ for example, any extension can exceed with the right amount of marketing juice. As Rick Schwartz said some time ago, it’s not domainers that will determine which of these extensions is going to be successful, it is the end users.
But I can, because its true. Of course you can advertise anything, but that does not make it profitable! Any extension that needs to PAY for advertising makes my point. Travel.com never needs to PAY for Tv advertising. And yes, end users have voted on .travel and its a bust.
Well people might get used to another extensions in distant future. But how long ? Another 10 years ? 20 years ? Even now after 10 years popularity of Internet still lots of people types .org or .net insted of .com, so projects on those already well-known extension are hemorraging traffic…
More info on .WINE ?
J-
You have to think of this from the other side.
Buying food.com or wine.com, is entirely different than buying the extension.
What Wolfgang is trying to do is go into the registry business.
That is different than buying food.com and developing and operating a site.
As a registry, it can be profitable without the extension being regarded as a huge “hit” from the user side.
How, you do just like .me did.
All premium locations go to auction.
.me made $2M just on the auctions on those domains which had 2 or more backorders on them, plus all of the money they have made from domain auctions at TRAFFIC, Sedo and now NJ, with more to come, plus the registration fees on 250K domains.
So I agree With Brian’s comment above, if there are hundreds of extensions, many will fail but some will become profitable enterprises to the registry.
Steve
Yes and No.
Lets say the American Bar Association get behind a .law for example and then promotes it to its millions of members.
And when I say promote they do it properly, hype it up starting like now, get the interest and demand growing, make it sound like the future of the legal profession on the internet and then roll it out using a .me auction formula.
Not so hard to do.
Now for other extensions like say .music, I agree that’s going to be a harder go.
So again out of hundreds of extension not all will fail, and will become profit centers for the registry.
UPDATE
Wolfgang Puck has posted video on his .food application and his thoughts behind it.
http://www.dotfoodtld.com/video/
Mike,
Clearly, auctioning/selling whatever.food to the 300k + usual keyword speculators will make money. That is no novel concept. (And whether or not that model adds tangible value to the Internet in general is an entirely different question.). So you are saying he has no real business concept behind the .food idea, just selling names. We already knew that. And I saw the video, it provides no rationale for .food whatsoever! In fact, that content does not need a .food registry to get that message across at all, the same could be accomplished on YouTube, food.com, etc, you name it.
Pushing these .whatevers without any logic (but just shameless celebrity marketing) at all is exactly how ICANN describes “demand”. Its “demand” to make money selling names to speculators, there is no true market demand for business applications for any of these extensions. Its like the condo craze but now its .whatever registries/their domains on the web. There was no demand for all those condos and there is no demand for domains under these wild extensions, just speculative hype in both cases. Its shameful ICANN tries to justify the extentions and now we have celebrity chefs knifing their way into the racket.
But if just selling names is Wolfie’s idea, he can do that on any .whatever name, there is no need to think so small with .food, .wine, etc., especially if its just to sell domain names. What would he care? So now its painfully obvious Puck will just be lending his name (by leveraging credibiity with food) with a possible % share in .food or .wine funding to pump up the hype for sales and he will get some % share of sales. Again, its nothing new, in Wolfie’s case he does it for overpriced cookware already, so why the heck not in domain names? Same scam.
I have to give credit to Mind + Machines for doing a celebrity round-up to exemplify “public demand” for these new TLDs that would challenge the best late night infomercial. First it was ex-VP Al Gore, then former NYC mayor Ed “I wouldn’t know a domain name if it hit me in the head” Koch and now Wolfgang “It’s all for a good cause” Puck. Mind + Machines’ MO is obvious and I believe it will be ultimately effective.
For the record, I am not against new TLDs if there is a legitimate need for them and not as a strategy to cover ICANN’s recent stock market losses. One thing that will be redefined here is the meaning of a successful TLD. I doubt that any of these TLDs will have over a thousand sites developed (and I don’t mean mini-sites) in the next five years. What you will have is a handful of mega-sites on each TLD promoted to the max by people like Puck. In addition, you will have a tsunami of domain speculators gobble up all of the generics with the best held back for an auction. The outcome? Some of these TLDs will turn a profit and in that regard they will be considered successful. However, the vast majority of these domain speculators are going to get burned when they try to resell and future TLD releases will be considered with the same affection as a tech IPO in mid-2000.
I’ve heard that ICANN is going to release a walloping 500 TLDs in the first year. My prediction? DotCom and ccTLDs will come out ahead, dotNet and dotOrg will hold steady and everything else will be a needle in a haystack.
Let the games begin.
I can’t wait Google to adapt its algorithm for new coming Top Level Domains.