Will firms use .BlackFriday domain names?

.BlackFriday domain names will soon be available. Will they be useful?

It’s Black Friday in the United States, the day that kicks off the holiday shopping season.

Frank Schilling’s Uniregistry applied to run the .blackfriday top level domain name. It’s possible this domain will be available by Black Friday 2014 despite a very poor priority draw number of 1415.

This is a unique domain in that it is targeted to a short period of time during the year; perhaps one or two weeks.

Here’s how the firm describes .blackfriday in its application:

Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year in the United States. .BLACKFRIDAY domain names will be among the best labels for businesses hoping to capture the attention of shoppers on this exceptional shopping day following United States Thanksgiving…

…Uniregistry will offer .BLACKFRIDAY as an intuitively relevant top-level domain serving registrants seeking to provide information regarding sales on the day following United States Thanksgiving.

I see a couple categories for .blackfriday domains. One is existing retailers or brands, the other is “generic” uses such as deals.blackfriday or electronics.blackfriday.

The big question I have for the first category is why Best Buy or Walmart would want a .blackfriday domain such as bestbuy.blackfriday. If you go to any of their sites today, it’s plastered with Black Friday. Come Monday it will focus on Cyber Monday.

Why would you want a different website for Black Friday? It makes little sense to me for retailers to own a separate .blackfriday domain and run a separate website.

Will they defensively register the domain? I bet they will, especially with how some retailers have fought off sites that scoop their Black Friday sales early.

I just don’t see a constructive use for these retailers. It will be interesting to see how this TLD plays out.