According to a story on CircleId.com, entitled “what will be the Magic number for the new gTLD Applications?, the number might be as high as 3,500.
I personally have had conversations with repected people in the space that thought there would be 1,500-2,000 applications filed.
The significance of the number of application is that is going to bear a direct relationship to when a second round might be opened.
ICANN has previously said it would not delegate more than 1,000 new gTLD strings in any one year.
If there are over 3,000 applications that means ICANN will be delegating extensions for years pushing back the 2nd round to many years from after the first round closes.
Certainly something to consider if your deciding whether to jump into the first round or wait for the next round to open up.
I am not sure where CircleID gets this magic number. But there some charts from ICANN that predict this number at the end of 2015.
Can’t find them now ofcourse but i seen the same numbers half a year ago. Thought it was nuts back then and i haven’t changed my mind.
This opportunity is INCREDIBLE. The rich will get richer IMO.
I only wish there was a way for the little guy to get involved – like contribute $10k or $20k for an equity stake (besides the .app program already outlined).
I have been trying so hard to like these new “rightofthedot”‘s, but I just can’t get myself to do it. Not from a domainer’s perspective, nor if I try to imagine what’s it like for the average joe schmo.
I realize that I am sticking my neck out here, and that a lot of you disagree.
For example, some of the bigshots went deep in .xxx (which I can partly understand, due to the massive marketing and perhaps one of the very few exceptions to my argument), but I assume that none of them would like this if it was jeopardizing the valuation of their key portfolio (.com .net .org and maybe the big tlds), since that is where the majority of their wealth is invested.
Is it perhaps because they see a new way to shake corporations for more money, offering to secure more names and all the other related cross-selling involved in domain consulting?
Peter
I think its called hedging your bets.
So in a world of what was 21 TLD’s that maybe 1,022 0r 3,022 in a few years NO ONE knows what the future holds.
We all have our opinions, our guesses but no one knows.
If the NFL expanded from 32 teams to 1,032 you want to predict how many Super Bowls in the next 10 years any one team would win?
I do know one thing
In the internet the only consistent factor is change.
So while it may hurt my .com holdings if people change their behavior and move to the right of the dot, I will make it back on the other side.
If the right produces nothing (which is not my opinion) then I spent a few bucks hedging my holdings and still have the .com side.
More importantly I do not believe domains names are “a zero sum game” where something has to lose in order for something else to win.
In the last few years we have .me which with the right domains has been a big win, .co with which the right domains is a win, I think the same for .XXX all the while .com’s are still strong.
Its a expansion of a new market, with new opportunities.
I would say 99.9% of these new extentions are company names. HR.pepsi, accounting.amazon, marketing.loreal, customerservice.Harrods…etc
MHB: Yes, excellent points and they are taken. I did not think of hedging my investments, because I am not big enough. Assume I have 100k invested in .com and my national .ccTld. I do not have a real incentive to invest right of the dot, because I only do development and I only develop perhaps a handful of my absolute best names.
Now if I was doing it more broadly (like the big elephants are), investing more in the namespace itself than developing each ultra-premium gem into million-dollar a year sites/stores/services, then perhaps I would be more inclined to “hedge bets” in currently inferior gTlds.
I have been following the domain world in one way or another since I was 15, and I have never understood why the biggest holders do absolutely nothing with the best names possible, but park them or put up some worthless “minisite”/MFA page. At age 24 I am in that position where I have something to invest, and I am definitely not following the path takes by the giants.
I could easily think of business models involving 100% outsourcing of all work, where all you do is provide name and/or some startup cash (which they do not seem to lack), which would hundredfold their revenue streams 🙂
Time for me to walk the walk i guess
@Peter.
.xxx is in its own world of a combination of up to 5% adult entertainment domains and the remainder in defensive reservations – and great returns for the .xxx registry – all the other .com’s will not be as fortunate.
Real simple if ICANN allows only 1000 apps then they see a future a some sorts – if they allow them all presumably 3500 at this point – they are already taking thrpwinf in the towel – giving themselves some sort of bonuses – more salary (or payolla is another way) and running for the hills.
Any one getting in – even as a DEMikey77 investor of 10-20K – better have an exact exit plan before putting in 1 cent – scarry stuff
Yes I agree. I think the main reason why these are being peddled at all, are the administrative fees at all levels possible, for those in the know.
Could be a mini-bubble in the making, .mobi times 3495
Coming Soon: mass confusion
3,500 new arguments for domaining’s blogs 🙂
3,500 new arguments for domaining blogs … 🙂
Privately owned gtlds can allow for massive marketing and branding campaigns.
Something never provided before with .tv, .mobi, .travel, etc.
I could easily see consumers attracted to these campaigns and shifting away from .com.
“no one knows”
exactly.
that’s why circleid is becoming unreadable. it’s 90% marketing. it’s speculation disguied as “advice”.
if we see an explosion in icann approved registries will we also see a parallel explosion in non-icann related registries?
if right of the dot becomes relevent to a new degree, if it becomes as important as left of the dot, and that how users are instructed to use the web, then you can be sure if history is any indication that users are going to be typing all sorts of nonsense right of the dot. what is icann’s root zone going to do with that nxdomain traffic? care to guess?
there are still plenty of open questions.
will there be other roots, that offer users more registries?
will all registries have to be owned by icann approved large players?
will icann be able to convince users that they should only use the icann root? how?
will device makers try to hardcode dns settings into devices so users are denied choice?
will people become insensitive to domain names and use another mechanism to identify and navigate to hosts on web servers?
maybe the more complexity and chaos that is added, the more heavily commercialised the web becomes, the more users will come to appreciate simplicity and information as simply information (not a sales pitch). this might happen slowly. maybe it will give rise to a new niche for extreme simplicity. that’s where my bets are hedged.
it’s happened before. google was once a simple alternative to increasing commercialisation and chaos. it’s not anymore.
things go in cycles.
well yeah, obviously they COULD allow for massive marketing campaigns, just as well (or not) as a .com could. Or are you saying there might be advantages for big companies to be running their own gTLD that they can’t get with the .com?
with com if a company wants to run some web-focused marketing campaign with some new slogan their marketing dept dreams up, they have to register the trademark (public notice that they might be using the slogan), then register a special domain in com for the campaign. that name may or may not be available. and there may be close variations of it registered by others.
if they have their own registry the process is a little easier. they can synthesize new domain names at will, with zero cost. it’s an entry in a text file.
of course, some users are still going to tack on .com
no company will ever be able to ignore .com
“of course, some users are still going to tack on .com”
Not some – but the vast majority are still going to tack on .com – but that will not stop these registries from making money by offering another perceived marketing angle.
No matter what is put on that billboard like :
Apple.Apple
Sports.Store
the consumer has been programmed by billions and billions of dollars of UDRP ACPA and other legal venues and marketing as well that they ran out of paint and will put the .com on.
Apple.Apple.com
Sports.Store.com
Hi Brian,
I notice you keep bringing that point up….but for me,
when typing such things as whois.sc or uspto.gov or my banks name .org
I never mess those up / or confuse with .com
There may be a break-in period…but the mind is happy when it types in the correct extension to where you want to go and is slightly disciplined when you type the wrong extension thus providing incentive to type the correct extension. If a habbit causes you get disciplined you start changing the habbit.
CM,
With enough money you can put quotes around anything and sell it on a billboard, TV, newspapers or other media sources like “MyMeds.info”:
For those that do not have that kind of dough, like me, I rely on the intutitve, self-promoting, self-marketing and self-advertising “.com”.
FYI – I do not own MyMeds.com – just an example
People automatically type .com – for now.
If many new gtlds are advertised, adopted and used, for cities, brands, etc. , the ‘intuition’ to add .com will diminish as users are more often than not led to a site they did not intend.
Things change, people adapt. It is the most distinctive human trait.
I hope I won’t have to uncheck 3500 extensions added to the dot COM name every time I go to register one. At the end of the day the challenge is the same: someone needs to sell these to end users who don’t know they need them. Just as they don’t know that they already own untapped power left of the dot that can deliver the same benefit.
This reminds me of the dot COM boom and bust in 2000. When investors threw money on ideas inventors thought the market would embrace.
The timed tested assurance of success begins with understanding and end users problem and offering a solution. Right now JC Penny and Sears are at death’s door. How can domains put them back in the game and offer a way to take on Amazon and make up for the 10 year head start they have leveraged to take your customers, your future and make it theirs. Solve this problem and you won’t be banking on luck, but taking a sure bet to the bank.
I think the most important thing relating to right of the dot is going to be how google treats them.
If you type in finance and you are presented with 10 XXXX.Finance sites then .finance is great. If after 24 months you type in finance and the first .finance site is on page 10 then you can forget right of the dot.
Whose your daddy?
GOOGLE.
only the biggest companies will buy and manage their own vanity-TLD, so, this evaluation could be greatly exagerated
Securing your brand name as a unique destination in cyberspace is a no brainer to most companies and the cost of doing so is peanuts in the scheme of things. In the process with the big shot ip lawyers they will begin to question ICANN and that could shake things up. I don’t see them using the .brand in the traditional ways debated here. But if you understand the future, the convergence of web and tv and the apple launch that will fundamentally change the game bigger than the iPhone did, advertising which has been TiVo d out to dimishing audiences is totally lost at sea and will be reengineered. Perhaps in a blog post I’ll share more of what I know. Meanwhile I’d like you to throw out a few ideas on how .pepsi would be deployed. An immediate issue is consumer becoming aware of dot pepsi but the branding is so strong they would expect to find pepsis site at dot pepsi. The brand reads like a destination so that’s going to need clarity.
Anyway nobody here is going to benefit from the brand buys.
brands owners already protect very well their TMs also without any vanity-URL
“Could be a mini-bubble in the making, .mobi times 3495”
Could be?
I can only imagine how many millions of new domain names will be sitting at sedo year after year with a for sale sign on them.
What is it right now, 7 Million ?
Gazzip offers a pretty compelling reality with sedo and .mobi.
.mobi Dick washed out to sea to the Bermuda Triangle with all the other non.com’s long ago.
An analogy to bringing one of these new TLD’s to life is like my bringing “R-E-A-L-E-S-T-A-T-E.com” to life – might look kinda of neat on a billboard if I wanted to blow a couple mils promoting it – but the reality is I question renewing it every year – because it is, in fact, a worthless ornament for the fireplace mantel – just like all these new TLDs.