Smartcompany.com.au, just covered the story of Glenn Ruscoe, who applied for the .physio domain, which he plans to sell to physiotherapists worldwide.
“Ruscoe told SmartCompany
“I was reading the newspaper one morning when I heard about the ICANN initiative and I thought, ‘That’s fantastic’, I want one of those for my practice website. I thought no one would do it in our profession and I thought if they wouldn’t I would.”
“As I read the newspaper article I was thinking what is the next business move for me, with $185,000 I could buy a house and have one tenant, which makes me $20,000 a year or I could have 20,000 tenants paying $100 – so it is a much better business model,” he says.
“The potential is there, as my research shows there are 700,000 physios in the world, so 20,000 is in the realms of 2% or 3% of this.”
If Ruscoe is successful, he believes setting up the registry and marketing the domain name will cost about $450,000.
“The market is very easily identified; it is physiotherapists with an online presence,” says Ruscoe.
“The primary method of marketing will be through the physiotherapy associations. I will look to set up reselling opportunities with them and it will become another source of revenue for the professional organizations.”
“I’m aware of applications for the domain names for .doctor, .law and .medicine and .physio needs to be in that space,” he says. “For individuals, it enables them to succinctly identify themselves to the world. It is a virtual calling card in a phrase ‘Glenn.Ruscoe.physio’.”
Ruscoe has set up site at Dotphysio.com, where physiotherapists can register their interest in buying one of the .physio domain names.
“I suspect I am the only applicant, as I have received endorsement from World Confederation for Physical Therapy and they have advised me that nobody else has applied for their endorsement,” says Ruscoe.
“I sought the endorsement because as part of the ICANN application you need to demonstrate support from the community you are going to be representing. I guess they trust me to do this well on behalf of the profession.”
The back end for .physio is ARI Registry Services.
He’s got the right idea. Now it’s about execution. Good Luck !
Gonna be a huge hit. Nearly a million bucks down the drain.
Should be the “I’m an ICANN sucker” poster boy.
.lol
Just from my experience, if I owned physiotherapist.com and I decided I wanted to sell it, rather than wait for a buyer to come to me, and I sent an email to all 700,000 physiotherapists in the world affecting the domain for sale for $100 to the first person that says “I’ll take it” I would expect to receive maybe 20 emails saying they will take it. Probably 2 out of that 20 would have paid more. This is a 1 time fee of $100 then just $8 a year renewal. Probably more than 20 will email me back saying I’m out or my mind. Of course it’s a decent domain just that’s the way it goes when you are looking for the buyer not the other way around.
I’m not saying that times will never change and or that this guys idea is bad or shouldn’t be tried. This is just my experience. I agree with him seems so simple and makes so much sense, but so far in my own practice I feel like this will be a tough mountain to climb. Best of luck to him.
Fools born everyday,. ICANN wins these losers lose
And wow sucks if next year somebody wants to compete against him and start .physiotherapis. And I thought it was stressful trying to decide if I should buy other derivations of .coms I own for just $8 a shot.
This was never about benefiting consumers, this was never about helping communities, even this guy admits it’s a “business move” aka a big money grab, and in this case a money incinerator.
One of the Lowest TLD Scores to Date 155
.INC 1280+
.WEB 1260+
.COOP 486
.AERO 308
And I thought .mobi was bad!
Yea uphill battle, this guy is looking at a sample population of 700,000 and wants to sell 20,000 registrations.
With .mobi the sample population is the number of mobile device users and makers of mobile products. What percentage sell through did try have?
It should be clear that not all new Top Level Domains will be **resolved** (carried) on all platforms. [Not all cable TV companies carry the same channels]
An ICANN endorsement only goes so far. The U.S. Government will have their own collection of Top Level Domains their government workers access.
The ICANN System [with undesired batches] appears poised to allow obscure TLDs to take a slot away from a .INC .WEB .ETC and even a .ASN which may be needed to register unique ASNs.
.ASN .ARPA .NET .BGP are different and should be processed first by ICANN in the 60 day requirement set by the IETF IAB ISOC.
Things that seem to make sense on paper, usually disappoint. It always looks so much easier than it ends up being.
If people hammered out their ideas in stone instead, given the extra effort that entails, they might think twice and put more thought into the feasibility of what they plan on doing.
Better to buy a house, especially at today’s depressed prices. But thinking you can get $20,000 per year ($1,666 per month?) from one tenant is just more evidence of the extremely optimistic tone of this whole idea. (Unless of course, the $185,000 is just a 5% down payment on the house/mansion.)
but I feel they will always choose the .com
A better business model for many of these gTLD owners will be (using this .physio guy for example) to just give the 700,000 domains away to licensed physiotherapists, give them a free website with easy templates (like godaddy’s website tonight), and then have the end-users agree to let you as the gTLD registrar sell ads on those 700,000 sites (only medical/pharma/local community related). Everybody wins.
.Flop
20,000 registrants each paying $100/yr?
Yeah, right. Good luck with that.