Rightside Group, Ltd. (Nasdaq:NAME), announced today it will launch 11 additional Top Level Domains (TLDs) by the end of 2014, bringing its in-market portfolio to 28.
Next week, members of the armed forces, as well as military families, supporters, and veterans, can begin registering .ARMY, .NAVY, .AIRFORCE, and .VET web addresses.
Launch activities will include a home-page promotion with registrar partner GoDaddy on Veterans Day, as well as a salute to U.S. veterans through a donation in support of Team Rubicon, a group of military veterans that partner with first responders to provide disaster relief. The domains become widely available on October 22.
Among the new TLDs geared toward professionals and businesses, .MORTGAGE and .MARKET will become available on November 5, with .ENGINEER following on November 19.
The new domains are expected to be well-received in the coming weeks as mortgage brokers, markets of all types and sizes, and professional associations discover and adopt these new alternatives to web addresses ending in legacy extensions such as .COM.
Wayne MacLaurin, Rightside’s Chief Technology Officer, plans to have the company’s engineering team use the new .ENGINEER extension for email correspondence. “Once the .ENGINEER domain is available, all the engineers on our team will have email addresses ending in @rightside.engineer, which will identify them as engineering professionals when they’re corresponding with colleagues, external partners, and within the tech community,” MacLaurin said. “Engineers take great pride in their profession, and I expect the .ENGINEER extension to catch on with civil, electrical, mechanical, software, and many other kinds of engineers in addition to those in the technology field.”
On December 10, the company will unveil .SOFTWARE, expected to be popular across the software developer and tech-startup communities, and .AUCTION, which will be useful to people, businesses, and charities wishing to help people find their auction-related websites, social feeds, and eBay profiles.
The launch of .DENTIST on December 24 will usher in the ability for dental professionals to move beyond the scarcity of web domains available with legacy extensions. Instead of relying on long, hard-to-remember web addresses, dentists will be able to connect with prospective and current patients using relevant and memorable web addresses featuring their locations and/or names, such as Aspen.dentist, orthodontic.dentist, or davidsmith.dentist.
These new TLDs offer the most memorable, relevant, and cost-effective way to improve visibility with new and existing patients at every point of contact – through online and offline ads, web and search traffic, signage, emails, and business cards.
Also launching on Christmas Eve, .REHAB will become available for clinics and professionals engaged in a variety of rehabilitation services, from physical rehab to substance-abuse treatment.
Hmm … As a .NAVY .VET and an .ENGINEER myself, I can’t help looking askance at these particular TLDs.
People in these career paths typically plug directly into pre-existing companies. Engineers are hired out of college to work in pre-existing roles in pre-existing companies. For the most part, these aren’t entrepreneurial folks who will have any need for online branding. A guy working in a semiconductor lab or a civil engineer drafting a plan for a new freeway overpass — they won’t go home and tinker with their .ENGINEER website. Self-promotion doesn’t enter into things. Software engineers maybe. But they have other options like .TECH or .COM.
As for the military, I wonder if Rightside has any veterans on staff. Do they realize how utterly different that culture is from civilian life? When active-duty personnel find time for the internet at all, they tend to spend that time as consumers on sites like Facebook or Youtube. Putting up websites of their own is a very very very very low priority. So will Rightside be doing deals with admirals and 4-star Generals in Washington D.C.? If domainers thought selling to corporate buyers was an uphill battle, I’d invite them to pitch .NAVY or .ARMY to tax-funded, career-military committees inside the Department of Defense — which already has .GOV, .MIL, and .COM at its disposal.
Hooray, more wildly overpriced premium fees from Rightside! I can’t wait! Now where did I put that $60k for this year?