Many analysts agree that the next 50 days can be fatal for the whole program of new TLDs. This is when general availability period starts for many promising domains that investors are betting on. If interest to the launch is significant enough, new domains will stop being something exotic in the public mind, they will be a recognizable and acknowledged part of Internet landscape.
In particular, during 50 days general availability period will start for .London and .NYC – geo domains of two cities that are among the most attractive for tourism and business in the whole world. Also registrations start in .realtor domain zone, that belongs to US National Association of Realtors, that promises a free giveaway of half a million names. If this happens, new domains will become more common in the US, where many users are not aware of existence of other domain zones apart from .com.
Registrar Radix launches registration in .host, .press and .website domains, that initially were considered very attractive and the competition for them was fierce. The same thing can be said about domains .cooking, .country, .fishing, .horse, .rodeo, .vodka, .beer and .surf. Registration for these domains is launched by Minds + Machines. By the way, it is worth remembering that Minds + Machines is a publicly-traded company, so it will be easy to see market’s reaction on the launch of new domains by change in the price of the shares.
However, analysts obviously say that a new gTLD program is a long-term project, so we shouldn’t judge the success of the marathon by the first kilometers of the race. But even though you can’t win a marathon right at the start, you can lose it by hopelessly lagging behind or getting off the race from the beginning.
Andrei Kolesnikov, CEO at Coordination Center, believes that New gTLD program can already be considered a success. “Back in August the number of domain names registered in new gTLDs exceeded 2 million. It demonstrated a great interest of users to new zones, since there were not that many truly mass domains. When a whole group of very interesting names is launched, we expect not only a new wave of interest to the program but a beginning of segmentation process of domain space on thematic grounds. “Internet-islands” that will appear in the near future are going to attract new users to the network, which will give an impulse to the further development of the global Internet”, he said.
