SEMANTICS
“RATHER THAN BEING STUNNED BY THE PROLIFERATION OF NEW DOMAINS, WEBSITE OWNERS HAVE EMBRACED IT, REGISTERING ADDRESSES NOT JUST IN HIGHLY ANTICIPATED BROAD- AUDIENCE gTLDS, BUT IN NICHE ADDRESSES.”
affinity with .pizza. Tey realise it’s a poor use of their marketing dollars to promote their affinity with the non-specific .com.
Tings get even better for the .pizza owners, however. First, almost every child on the planet knows what pizza means, and most will have a strong and measurable reaction to .pizza names. Few children feel the same about .com. Second, search engines will love new domains. If a website has a .pizza domain, what are the chances its content is predominantly about pizza? (Answer: overwhelming.) Search engines won’t take long to work that out.
Users can also use new domains to stack multiple affinities in the same address. If I owned a pizza restaurant in New York, I’d place a high priority on registering
www.newyork.pizza ahead of my competitors.
Semantics + affinity = relevance
Te evolution of the internet has been towards relevance. What started as the world’s first mass communications platform has increasingly evolved into a technology that delivers users precisely the information they seek.
Online advertising, social media, blogging and even traditional content such as news and entertainment have all been migrating towards relevance for well over a decade, so in many ways the domain name system is playing catch-up.
At a time when the videos you watch, the news you read and the adverts you are served are all tailored for maximum relevance, it only makes sense that the platform on which all of that content rides reflects the same evolutionary process.
36 Trademarks & Brands Online
Indeed, the dramatic response to the new gTLD programme reflects just how much pent-up demand existed from users who want their web addresses to reflect the rest of their online experience. If domain name companies had their way, they would have been offering those choices more than a decade ago, but the internet policymaking process sometimes takes time to catch up with demand.
One of the myths about the new gTLD programme is that it is simply a numbers game: more registries and more gTLDs equals more competition and more choice for users. Tat is true to an extent, of course, but the lasting impact of the programme won’t just be about the quantity of domains, but about better, more relevant domains.
One thing that has surprised even domain name veterans is how quickly the global online community has begun to brush off the inertia caused by more than two decades of constrained choice and artificial loyalty. During the Soviet era, stories were told of former communists walking into Western grocery stores and fainting in the face of so much choice.
We always expected it would take some time to break the psychological hold of a domain that users have grown up with. Te value proposition of new domains may be obvious, but old habits sometimes die hard.
Internet users, however, have shown a great deal more flexibility and resilience than your average former Soviet citizen. Rather than being stunned by the proliferation of new domains, website owners have embraced it, registering addresses not just in highly anticipated broad-audience gTLDs, but in niche addresses serving highly specific communities.
With many of the most attractive gTLDs still awaiting delegation, the programme remains on pace to exceed two million registrations in the first nine months of availability. Relevance, it appears, matters in every language.
Te .com domain retains some prestige as the oldest and largest, but anyone who has observed the rise and fall of online businesses for any length of time knows that incumbency doesn’t have the same power in the digital age as it did when photocopiers and fax machines ruled the technological landscape.
If there’s a defining feature of business in the internet age it’s that when someone builds a better mousetrap, users don’t waste too much time with the older model.
Volume 3, Issue 3
Bob Samuelson brings more than 15 years of domain, brand protection and digital marketing experience to the Donuts team. After working at .tv, he joined Verisign’s Digital Brand Management Services group, providing domain portfolio management and brand protection services for some of the world’s largest and most respected brands. Most recently with the Marketing Cloud division of Adobe Systems, he gained invaluable knowledge about the website creation life cycle and the consumer experience.
When faced with a choice between an extraordinarily long and esoteric new .com address or a shorter but more expensive one on the secondary market, and a targeted registration in a wide open new gTLD, users are not going to have to ponder too long before making their decision.
Tat still leaves something in the order of 100 million .com addresses in circulation, and one can expect that they’ll be around for some time. But when the newest, coolest companies on the block start identifying themselves not with miscellaneous .com addresses but with affinity and meaningful and relevant new gTLDs, we might be surprised how many legacy customers start jumping ship.
Relevance is here, and all indications are that it’s here to stay. Te only question is who realises it last. n
Bob Samuelson is vice president of sales and marketing at Donuts Inc. He can be contacted at:
bob@donuts.co
www.trademarksandbrandsonline.com
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