According to a study commission by Afilias, almost Half of Major Consumer Brands Set to Apply for a dot Brand Top-Level Domains.
The USA / UK survey, was conducted by Vanson Bourne, and found that 82% of major brands are aware of the opportunity to apply for a dot Brand TLD, and that of those “aware” 54% of those companies intend to apply for a dot Brand TLD.
The survey of 200 consumer-facing businesses with 3,000-10,000+ employees, was conducted in February 2012
The survey captured the attitudes and intentions of companies in regards to the ICANN “New gTLD” program.
Of the companies that are aware of the program, more than half are actively planning to apply while another 40% are still considering applying.
71% of companies who are keeping the new gTLD program under consideration said they believe dot Brand domains are an important trend to watch.
While the majority of respondents are aware of the dot Brand opportunity, almost half of those businesses, 47%, were unaware of the looming deadline which is April 12, 2012, when ICANN will close the submission window.
Further, 17% of respondents said they would consider it “regrettable” if they missed the application deadline.
Respondents were also asked if they are aware that ICANN has not announced a next round of applications, and that the wait may be several years until the next round commences. A total of 44% said they were not aware of this gap between the current round ending on April 12 and the next one, whenever that may be.
Afilias is a back end provider of registry services for existing TLD’s and new gTLD’s and also owns the .info and .mobi registries.
Those percentages seem very high, I seriously doubt less than 10% of companies apply, after going through process, and fee structure.
I’d agree with Ron, that those numbers don’t seem very accurate – or there’s an inherent bias in the answers given…because the respondents could be afraid to state, otherwise.
Large companies really don’t allocate budgets for this (major) type of expense. And any spend on this would come from the legal department, rather than the marketing department (because this will be viewed as a purely ‘defensive’ purchase, at least at this early stage).
The problem is that legal departments really don’t have much of a ‘discretionary’ budget, anymore. They’re all cutting costs like crazy, getting rid of expensive staff, and sending most of their churn/burn work overseas.
So the bottom line is that, even if these figures are, in fact, accurate, the follow-through on these ‘plans’ to do so will be negligible…at least at this stage.
When the first line is “According to a study”
it is totally “BullS”
I don’t buy into their figures either. Seem inflated to me. But I’m just one opinion. Curious if Vanson Bourne has applied for their own TLD. That would build in bias to the survey.
I agree that the numbers seem very high. But regardless of what the numbers are, the number of registrants is fairly unimportant, in the long run. The application price is nothing for big brands and it is a fairly inexpensive brand protection move. What will be far more telling is how many companies actually implement the new extensions. And I think the percentage of companies doing that will be very, very low
I don’t think .brand domains are much of a risk, if there is a .coke or .pepsi for example, they won’t be doing open registrations for the masses, it will just be for in-house websites. It would take away from companies having to buy more .com/.net/cctld extensions, but not a huge impact IMO.
If the numbers in the study are true, it shows something else – that big companies still see value and worth in domain names in general. Domains are here to stay for a long while.
I head up legal for a large, multi-billion consumer products corp. We will not be applying for a “dot brand” extension.
” they won’t be doing open registrations for the masses, it will just be for in-house websites.”
Surely it would start this way, but would it remain that way? People are looking to monetize everything these days – it would just be unsurprising!
foolish
According to a study commissioned by the glue industry, over 90% of Americans support using wild horses in the manufacturing of adhesive products…
With few exceptions, the percentage of respondents who indicate they are “likely/very likely” or “intend/strongly intend” to make a future purchase of any product/service is almost always overstated.
Survey respondents (some consciously, some unconsciously) know there is no real risk of personal injury/penalty/liability for indicating a hypothetical ‘intent’ to conduct an act (such as an ‘intent’ to purchase). Therefore, positive ‘purchase intent’ is often overstated in these types of ‘exploratory’ market research studies.
No doubt, the research agency (in consultation with Afilias) will determine an appropriate ‘discount rate’ to apply to the study results in order to determine/model a most realistic scenario. Of course, they are under no obligation to share with the public any ‘discount rate’ they might be applying (…especially if the raw survey results better align to the corporate agenda).
Steve
All companies or major brands at the beginning will use their own gtld.
This spells end of .com era and the only thing that will matter will be
short and meaningful
.Co is king
what the f*** have I been telling you.
Loving it. Every f***en story has something to do with
.Co and the end of left of dot era.
You’re seriously making these blog comments intolerable, RobertCline.
You haven’t added anything to the discussion for over a year now, aside from this idiotic .co howling.
I have no idea why Berkens has allowed it to continue for as long as he has, but chalk up this one vote as someone who’s just plain sick and tired of reading your bullshit. Your incessant presence here diminishes the credibility of this blog.
Question for Untrue: Given that entering into the domain name game is not on your company’s marketing agenda, I am genuinely curious why you would be reading this blog. Is this on company time, or your own?
What we have here is a study paid for by a new gTLD service provider. A clear bias and conflict of interest. Ho hum.
Over on CircleID, we have a service provider openly soliciting anyone who might have some claim to a new gtld so that the applicable rules for applying can be circumvented. He’ll apply on your behalf and if approved he’ll run the registry. Maybe he’ll cut you a check occassionally.
Sounds much like what’s been done with the cctld’s like Tuvalu, Montenegro, Indian Ocean, etc. There are rules that are supposed to ensure that these tld’s bear some relation to what they are intended to represent. Country Codes. Why such rules are needed is left as an exercise for the reader.
But the service providers are happy to work around that obstacle. Makes you wonder if they are really providing a “service”. In truth,, they are running the entire operation. All they need from you is permission to use your identity as a legitimate applicant. That is something that they themselves lack.
Robert Cline can’t even afford to renew his .co at $20+ per pop, the traffic flow hasn’t been there, some of the generics have sold well, but Robert Cline did not get any action on those. Majority who didn’t get in pre sunrise, and registered a lot of .co’s most likely is underwater, other than the random sale.
Does seem high compared to the just over 200 applications in recent news and the current applicants list shown at http://dot-nxt.com/applicants – some strange ones there compared to the .3-letter ones mentioned in URLmad site rant (http://urlmad.com/blog/get-dot-anything-newgtlds-for-just-5-grand-save-180-thousand-dollars/), not to mention all the .2-letter (using IDN) available. Is it really worth it even for big companies to waste $185k then $5k yearly fees compared the the already cemented .com they have the rights to anyway, nothing wrong with a good old sub.domain .com
Since companies just want to create a .brand, why doesn’t ICANN create a right of the dot domain name system that allows companies to create this brand structure without the need of companies to run an entire registry. It just seems overly complicated and expensive for what many of these .brand type of companies may really need. Hate to be skeptical, but I am…call it registry light, reserves the space but with half the commitment.