.Boats and .Yachts launched recently, but you probably didn’t hear regarding them

Restrictions mean little exposure for .boat and .yachts.

Publishing firm Dominion Enterprises launched the .boats and .yachts top level domain names the prior week.

Odds are you didn’t hear regarding the launch. The reason is simple: these are restricted domain names.

You must have a tie to the marine world in order to register a .boats or .yachts domain name. Registrations are held until this connection can be verified.

Domain name registrars hate this kind of verification. As a result, only four domain name registrars right now offer these two domain names, as stated by the domains.boats site.

Is this a bad business decision for Dominion? Maybe, but you need to consider its business to understand why it took this approach.

The firm owns a number of marine publications, counting Boats.com. Locking up .Boats may have been somewhat defensive.

This also allows the firm to sell domains as an add-on service to the people who list boats and yachts for sale on its sites, counting YachtWorld.com and BoatTrader.com.

It could still do this if the domains weren’t restricted, but I suspect it’s trying to control the domain’s usage as much as possible.

If the goal is to treat the domains as a profit center, then the firm ought to have gone with a more open model, perhaps with a high starting price and premium pricing for the better domains. If it’s merely to protect and improve its brands in the marine space, then its closed approach might be justified.