Sometimes when you read an article on a technology website you need to make sure the author is not related to the company in a sponsored content or guest blogger type deal. Many times when I read new gtld stories I see these types of articles, nothing wrong with them but they don’t carry any weight since the author has a vested interest in promoting the topic.
I read an article on GeekWire that gave .news and registry owner Rightside a little plug, the author Jacob Demmitt is a staff writer for GeekWire so there doesn’t look to be any bias in this case. .News is one of the new gtlds that does seem to make sense to me, ntldstats shows the extension in position #62 with 19,443 registrations.
From the article:
Rightside CEO Taryn Naidu rattled off just a few of the brands that have already claimed their slice of the new digital real estate on .news, including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Major League Baseball, BMW and Starbucks. And that’s not counting the media enterprises you would expect like CBS, CNN, FOX and BBC.
“We really liked it,” Naidu said. “The very specificness of it, but also the broad uses. It’s easy to connect the dots on the value proposition of this extension. We think it kind of capures the entire universe of information.”
Some companies have been buying their names on controversial gTLDs — like .porn and .sucks — just so no one else can use them. It’s unclear if that’s happening with .news, but we do know not everyone who bought the extension has put it to use quite yet. Apple.news, for instance, doesn’t go anywhere. Microsoft bought a few domains, such as xbox.news and surface.news, but those are just set to redirect users to a Bing search for “xbox” or “surface.”
But others are already up and running. The Los Angeles Times is using latimes.news as a shortcut to get people to its local news section, while Paramount Pictures is using paramount.news to lend credibility to a landing page for its social media accounts.
Read the full article on GeekWire
Steve says
I like the extension, as well. It has potential with brands like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft (companies that provide multiple offerings, in addition to NEWS)..click or touch Google.News rather than Google.com then News
I also recognize it’s projected over 90% of users will access news on the web via smartphone/tablet/phablet/wearable apps. (Brands could create apps with the .news extension, of course)
Keith says
Yep we like it a lot an launched Business Economics and Finance news on it. We like the fact that its brief and to the point as an extension. Also it is quite clear what to expect from the .news extension.
Abrasax Industries says
I think .NEWS really .ROCKS for a .WEBSITE
M. Menius says
.news embodies the projected benefits of having a good keyword as a tld. So logical and intuitive. And no mistaking what the tld represents or was intended for.
Joseph Peterson says
I agree that the author’s writeup is more balanced than most. It’s not simply an advertisement and worth a read. Still, I tend to think the article placement itself was paid for by Rightside. Bigger news sites (Forbes, et al.) have brokers who go out soliciting advertorials from companies and their PR / marketing agencies. Brokers guarantee to publish a full-length piece on any subject for a fee, and they’ll assign a staff writer as needed.
Consider this sentence:
“It’s just the latest new domain extension to catch fire, though none has gone fully mainstream quite yet.”
That may represent the author’s viewpoint, but it also suggests that readers ought to hurry up and buy .NEWS domains while they’re hot, before the mainstream public beats them to it. To me, that sounds like a paid advertorial – even though it’s a subtle sales pitch.
We live in an age of advertorials. The line is so blurred between journalism and ads that it’s never safe to assume impartiality on the part of editors.