The Business Case for Your Own Top-Level Domain Name
Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership brought us a free webinar: “Who Should Invest in a dotBRAND?” Now here’s the deal: Beginning on January 12, 2012, you can apply for any kind of new dot–not only the dotCOMs or dotORGs, but a whole new world of generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). Coke might buy […]
Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership brought us a free webinar: “Who Should Invest in a dotBRAND?” Now here’s the deal: Beginning on January 12, 2012, you can apply for any kind of new dot–not only the dotCOMs or dotORGs, but a whole new world of generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). Coke might buy .Coke and Pepsi .Pepsi. You could even buy .Happiness.
I should that mention that while some of the brand domains won’t be available to the public, as many as possible will be found at Name.com. That covered, we hoped to find out something else: Is this right for you?
In the beginning, it was weird. The presentation was stilted and filled with nervous trepidation, like they were being held hostage by a gun-toting naysayer. I pinged that to Ashley, our marketing coordinator, and she said that maybe they were trying to weed out the bad applicants. The awkwardness highlighted the very real debate about the necessity of these new domains. Our hosts were wrestling with the negative aspects of owning one. However, if you stayed long enough, you would be comforted by benefits of paying $185,000 to apply for your own top-level domain. First, let’s take a look at the downside of ponying up for your own TLD.
Another example is that a premium brand like .ROLEX could let customers know who their authorized dealers are, and Rolex saves on fraud an abuse.