The .Brand Challenge to .Com
“Ancillary” .com domain name purchases might be jeopardized when firms start using .brand domain names.
On the prior week’s Verisign investor conference call, an analyst asked the firm what effect .brand domain names might have on .com.
Verisign CEO James Bidzos stated that, even if a firm adopts a .brand domain name, they won’t abandon .com. His point was that if a firm like Google starts using .Google instead of Google.com (my example), it’s not going to let Google.com expire in order to save $8 a year.
I don’t think anyone will disagree with this.
The challenge for .com when it comes to .brands is longer term, and doesn’t have much to do with a firm’s main .com domain name. It has to do with the hundreds or thousands of additional .com domain names firms register for promotions, product lines and brand protection.
Consider the 35 .com domain names that Guthy Renker registered the prior week. The firm, best known for selling Proactiv acne care, registered grclk026.com, grclk027.com…all the way to grclk060.com.
I have no idea what it plans to do with these domain names. They most likely will be used for some sort of tracking.
If Guthy Renker had its own .brand domain name, such as .proactiv, would it have registered grclk026.proactiv or 026.Proactiv instead of the .com domain name?
These days, even when a brand adopts something other than .com, they frequently register .com domains to protect their brand. Consider Google’s holding firm, Alphabet, which made big news when it selected abc.xyz for its domain name. It subsequently registered lots of Alphabet-related .com domain names. Each one of those domains is another eight bucks in Verisign’s coffers.
If a firm adopts a .brand domain name, it’s possible they will not register as many .com domain names.
I think this challenge for Verisign and .com is probably a decade away. Right now, very few firms own a .brand domain name. We’re probably a number of years off from another round of .brands, and even at that point I don’t see a major surge in the number of .brand owners unless the cost plummets.
One a firm adopts a .brand, it will also be smart for them to continue protecting their brand in .com for the foreseeable future. Very few people understand that fresh domains exist, and even fewer that a firm can use a .brand domain name. Even if Dell sets up order.dell, it’s still going to want to own orderdell.com to protect itself.
This may well change at some point in the future, but I think it’s a long way off.
The point is that Verisign won’t worry regarding losing the $8 a firm spends on its main .com if it gets a .brand. That’s not going to happen. What the firm and investors ought to worry regarding are the many other .com domains firms purchase. If .brand domain names go mainstream, this revenue stream could be jeopardized in the long run.
