Yesterday Left of the Dot, the company that took over management of Christmas.com in October, rolled out free sub-domains called Christmas Family Pages.
Christmas Family Pages “are free for families and allow for real-time sharing of photos, recipes, Christmas traditions, wish lists, and memories.
“Every family who creates an account gets their own part of Christmas.com (e.g., SmithFamily.Christmas.com) which they can share by inviting the people they care about.”
“The functionality of Christmas.com Family Pages includes:
- Sharing photos from phones, digital cameras, tablets or PCs
- Saving family traditions & recipes for posterity
- Creating personal wish lists for all family members
- Sending invitations via email or Facebook
- Simple personalisation of the look and feel”
The overall concept is brilliant.
Get people to Chirstmas.com.
Get users to pick out the gifts they want, create a wish list and let Grandma and Uncles know what users want for Christmas. While the relatives or other invited friends are checking out family pictures on the subdomain.christmas.com, well they might as well buy the items on the wish list from Christmas.com
So its a social network mixed with a shopping site and is a arguably a better monetization concept than Facebook.com has been able to figure out.
The good news is that the subdomain is free and all the pics are stored for free in the cloud and only viewable by those you give access to, not friends of friends or anyone else.
The bad news is that the sub domains are subject to Terms of Service (TOS) of the site, which although don’t specifically talk about the sub domains, does talk about accounts in general and in that regard the site states:
“We may permanently or temporarily terminate or suspend your User account or access to the Service for any reason, without notice or liability to you, including if in our sole determination you violate any provision of these Terms, or for no reason.”
Moreover, if you think you can register a great generic term like Gifts.Christmas.com Shop.Christmas.com or Santa.Christmas.com the folks at Left of the Dot, tell me they have reserved an undisclosed number of such generic sub domains.
Frank Schilling’s Uniregistry is planning on offering new gTLD’s ending in .Christmas.
Uniregistry has stated that they aren’t going to hold back any reserved premium generic domains.
So domain names like Gifts.Christmas, Shop.Christmas or Santa.Christmas will be available for registration on a first come first served basis (subject to required Sunrise period for TM Holders)
According to Uniregsitry:
“.Christmas will be an online wonderland of websites dedicated to nothing else but this magical time of year.”
“More sharing, more festivities, easier gift-buying – all of the wonderful uses of the Internet in the Christmas season will be enhanced by the .christmas top-level domain.”
“Having “.christmas” at the end of your domain name will instantly warm the hearts of your visitors. Whether you have products to sell, or just good cheer to spread, your domain will tell your audience that you’re all about the joy of the holiday season.”
So its seems that the subdomains.christmas.com is going to eventually be in competition with the new gTLD domain.christmas
New gTLD’s domain holders will have ownership rights, assuming no trademark violations, although the domain will not be free and any extra’s such as cloud storage of photos may or may not be offered by the registry.
So in the long term which would you rather own subdomain.christmas.com or domain.christmas?
smithfamily.christmas.com, and names like it, are just too
long… there’s one too many ‘dots’ in the name for this to be
a practical, workable, concept.
the idea does bode well, however, for the owners of ‘.christmas’,
who will be in a position to offer much more desirable addresses;
e.g. smithfamily.christmas
“The overall concept is brilliant.” so funny 🙂
This is the gtld secret weapon. Being able to drop the .com, .net or .whatever off the end and shortening the domain is what will make the gtld succeed with highly sought after keywords. The internet as we know it is going to change and humans are born to adapt and they will to the new gtlds.
I like the concept.
I have a domain name for sale Christmastime.me as a little wordpress site and it woulda been nice to have that concept on a name like that as well…
The subdomain is preferable. This plays off an idea Ray Neu and I had, along with a third party, back in 2009, to create a gift-sharing domain for all occasions, not just Christmas. It kind of fell flat when the third party had some “issues,” and ran out of money. LOL!
Anyway, I’ve got mine. Hee hee.
I would prefer to own a .christmas domain over getting a free subdomain on christmas.com that could be taken away from me at anytime, if I had to choose.
If the .Christmas gtld goes live, they should offer a free website or webpage to go with it, where you can build your own christmas themed page.
I also wonder if .xmas would be better (shorter to type)? Using iphones, ipods and ipads makes you appreciate shorter domain extensions, and the .com button.
…Then I guess it’s .festivus for the rest of us…
No Contest
with four less characters, including one less dot – second level names under .christmas win hands down.
The free choice is usually the obvious winner in most people’s eyes. That’s why PlentyOfFish.com does so well, compared to dating sites one has to pay for.
Most people would send an email to friends with the address of the page, at which point the receiver can just click on the address. So length isn’t especially an issue, and if it is for some reason, sites like TinyURL can fix that.