Reglikedomain industry desk

And .IBM Make No Sense — Why .eBay

Marketing potential of brand-name top level domains seems limited.

I’ve had a question regarding the proposed fresh top level domains for a long time. And no one has provided me with a good answer. Hopefully someone reading this can provide one.

A handful of people have suggested fresh top level domains are an excellent global branding opportunity for brands such as eBay and IBM. Instead of promoting eBay.com or IBM.com, they can promote their own top level domains .ebay and .ibm.

Let’s assume both of these firms get their own tld. Pop quiz: how do you visit that firm’s home page?

You can’t just type “ebay” into your browser. The way browsers are set up now you can’t even type .ebay into your browser and expect to be taken to the .ebay tld. There has to be a second level domain, such as home.ebay.

It reminds me of the mobile web site conundrum. If I want to go to CNN’s mobile web site, I don’t know if I ought to type cnn.com, cnn.mobi, cnn.com/m, m.cnn.com, etc. The same thing goes for fresh TLDs that are used as brands.

Even if a global brand gets its own top level domain, it will still need to “mirror” that tld on its .com address. Consider that eBay promotes “go to shop.ebay”. At first, 99% of people will type in shop.ebay.com. That number will decrease over time, but not quickly. And e-mail addresses? If the address is promoted as [email protected] (remember, it has to have something ahead of the tld), 99% of people will send mail to [email protected]. So eBay will have to mirror its email addresses.

When you see a domain name in an ad, on TV, or billboard, you know it’s a domain name since it either has a common extension (such as .com) or start with www. (Seriously, I was confused when a billboard showed the .jobs extension).

At current prices, only a modest percentage of firms can afford their own top level domain. So internet users will continue to default to .com.

This isn’t an argument against generic top level domains such as .bank (although there are plenty of arguments regarding that), but many people who make money from working with brands keep pumping fresh TLDs as a great branding opportunity. It doesn’t make sense to me.

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