Seven new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) went up for public sale last Wednesday. Many more will be coming throughout this year. Should you start grabbing every new domain name out there or should you simply ignore them?
The first 7 domains released for sale are: bike, .clothing, .guru, .holdings, .plumbing, .singles, and .ventures. 60 new gTLDs are now available on pre-order. Hundreds of others will be hitting the marketplace this year and will be sold through popular resellers such as GoDaddy.
My first thought was: “How cool! I should register Marketing.Guru!!!” but a few minutes later the reality kicked in. I can reasonably predict the failure of these top level domains in the next 5-10 years. Sure, they’ll exist but will they take over the internet? They probably wouldn’t.
Welcome to this week’s SEO Fridays!
New Domain Names Are Bound to Fail.
Remember when .eu domains were first released for Europe? The sales were high and the demand was incredible. Lots of folks snapped these domains. Domain squatters registered thousands of potentially premium .EUs hoping to resell them for a higher price tag later on. Now, how often do you see a .eu website ranking on Google? Almost never. These top level domains failed miserably.
Our short attention span is another reason why these new domains will not survive. Most people have a hard time remembering your domain name (unless it’s a .com). Do you think people will remember .sock, .house and .sandwich?
Which Domain Names Do You See Online?
Without a doubt, .com is the most popular domain name. Sometimes you will see a .org or a .net. Government domains (.gov) and Educational domains (.edu) also show up from time to time but you can’t register those. You may also spot a .info or a .biz domain but even those don’t really rank well and aren’t very trusted by the average Internet user. Sure, there are some very high quality .info domains (ex. Montreal’s Public Transport Society uses STM.info) but generally .info is not a good idea.
As you can see, every top level domain besides the few main ones has always failed. They don’t rank well, they aren’t trusted by users. So why release hundreds of new gTLDs if they will fail anyways? The answer is simple: Money. Domain name wholesalers and resellers don’t really care if your website gets good Google ranking, all they care about is profit. (surprise-surprise).
Who Will Buy The New Domains?
The new gTLDs are great for branding. Especially if you are a big corporation. Apple just purchased 4 new domain names: apple.guru, iphone.guru, ipad.guru, mac.guru – and I can’t wait to see what they’ll do with these domains. However, we all know that whenever we’ll need something from apple we’ll go to Apple.com and not mac.guru.
Just like with .eu and other gTLDs, domain name squatters will register every possible domain name out there and try to sell it to you. They will lose money because most of these domains will expire without ever being sold but it doesn’t matter because domain resellers will make their money.
Copyright infringement is a big deal in our time and age. If you think that you could register Google.something or Walmart.store and try to sell it to the respective companies – think again. First of all, many of these companies already requested to disable registrations for domain names that include their company name or their product names. Second, if you do succeed at registering one of these domain, you will be sent a cease and desist and you will have to give up that domain.
Conclusion
Forget the new gTLDs craze. Stick to the traditional .com.
Have anything to add? Leave a comment below!
– Alex
