At the Fairwinds Beyond The Dot conference this morning Shaul Jolles President and CEO of the the .Uno registry laid out his goal for the .UNO registry
.UNO wants to be the .COM to the spanish speaking market.
.UNO will globally connect over 490 million Spanish speaking businesses, consumers and individuals.
Mr. Jolles in laying out his vision cited some live .UNO “sites”
However each and everyone is being forwarded to site built on either a .com or a .org
Here are the sites cited by Mr. Jolles:
AARP.Uno is being forwarded to AARP.org
McDonalds.Uno is being forwarded to Meencanta.com
BBB.uno is being forwarded to BBB.org
ForRent.uno ForRent.com
ExtraSpace.uno ExtraSpace.com
Hyatt.uno Hyatt.com
Even so, I get that for English sites trying to appeal to a Spanish audience its much easier to reach them have a .Uno address and redirect them to the .com/.org Spanish site, rather than to have the user look around an English site for the Spanish version.
Certainly there are certain countries where websites can auto detect the local language and auto switch the user to the Spanish version but there are tens of million of Spanish speaking customers in countries where the “official” language is not Spanish.
Just when I thought the irrational unrealistic New gTLd comments presentations and propositions were over …Nope!
I nearly popped my carotid artery on this one …
What Mr Jolles proposes is the equivalent of saying:
Dot One wants to be the English equivalent of Dot Com.
UH?
Here is a little “keeping it real” a current state of affairs in some of the spanish language economies, the ones that matter …
First-off you have the Premium Spanish language market:
Spain: still seating in a deep deep recession and a large number of employed…
where Dot Com is the undisputed King and Dot Es is at a distant second place
Then for LATam you have the 3 large markets according to someone in google…
1)Brazil where the Dot Com Dot Br is the undisputed King and the Dot Com a far distant second choice
2)The Argentinian market were Dot Com Dot Ar domains are “el FREEbo” … Gratis …while the country is going thru economic and social turmoil… let’s see: Do I buy bread today or do I buy a New domain?
lastly
3)Mexico…where the Dot Com is the King and the rest of the spoils get divided between the Dot Mx and the Dot Com Dot Mx where there is no clear second choice…