Why Frank Schilling’s fresh bus ad uses http://

Otherwise, lots of people might not get to the website.

Yesterday Frank Schilling tweeted this picture of a bus ad for his .sexy top level domain name:

Adrian Kinderis, CEO of ARI Registry, responded asking regarding why the ad includes https://, and Frank Schilling explained:

That lots of cell phone users need to type in http:// ahead of a fresh TLD if they’re typing the address into their address bar, is a key example of the universal acceptance problem with fresh TLDs.

Even if cell phone browsers universally recognized fresh TLDs, would advertisers feel inclined to put www. ahead of the domain so people recognized it as a domain name, as Kinderis proposes? That might separate it from ads with dots that aren’t domain names:

The problem with what Frank did here, is that even through people will now recognize this as a web address, they probably won’t type in http:// at the beginning. When’s the last time someone typed http:// in front of a web address, except for fresh TLD applicants trying to access their domains on different devices?