According to Domain Name Wire, XYZ LLC has acquired the rights to the new generic top-level domain .CEO. The domain was delegated back in December 2013, but for almost ten years it has not gained any meaningful popularity. However, many domain industry experts doubted its prospects from the very beginning. The abbreviation CEO, which has long taken root in many languages of the world, stands for Chief Executive Officer and is used to designate senior persons in the corporate governance hierarchy. Critics quite rightly noted that acquiring a domain name in the .CEO zone would be tantamount to hanging a “I’m the big boss” sign on one’s chest, and there are not many executives of large businesses interested in doing that.
The domain was not helped much, to put it mildly, by the strange marketing strategy chosen by the previous .CEO registry, PeopleBrowsr. Its first commercial is generally recognized as a masterpiece of the absurd: in it, receptionists perform something like rap, dressed in Donald Trump masks. How this was supposed to help the popularity of the domain zone remains a mystery, apparently, even to the creators of the video (it has since been removed from YouTube). Then there were attempts to experiment with animation and, finally, quite logical but very boring images of gray-haired men in severe business suits. All this, combined with annual name registration costing approximately $100, led to logical results: in ten years the number of domain registrations barely exceeded 3,000.
It will be interesting to see what steps XYZ Registry takes to breathe new life into the domain. In any case, when it comes to marketing new domain zones, it definitely has a much more successful track record than PeopleBrowsr.
