It’s now been six months since the first new web address endings such as .London, .bank and .shop entered the digital market. Whilst these new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) haven’t set the world alight yet, with take up from brand holders relatively modest, there is no doubt that they will revolutionise the internet as we know it. In the first six months of the programme, the new domains have slowly gathered momentum, although few of the TLDs had universal appeal to businesses wanting to create a new digital brand image.

Many brand holders cannot see the value in securing their trademarks or brands in Top Level Domains such as .farm, .plumbing or .accountants, but there are a few that have universal appeal to digital marketers. One of the most popular has been .club which secured tens of thousands of registrations in its first few weeks. Other TLDs that have been registered in volume include .app .reviews and surprisingly, .guru, which was launched in the first phase of domain names and was the most registered TLD for months until the launch of .club.

The tipping point

The secret to the success of the new domain names is to use the new suffixes to change customer behaviours. Web coding today, using technologies such as HTML5, means that individual pages within a website often have URLs made up of incoherent letters, numbers and symbols, making it impossible for users to direct type. However, the new gTLD programme allows digital managers to segment their audience. Why wouldn’t you use a .career or .careers for your vacancies page? Or offering help and advice on products by using a .support domain?

However, for the TLDs to be successful, brand owners need to take a step into the unknown and start using them. In the book “The Tipping Point”, the author, and eminent thinker, Malcolm Gladwell, analysed the moment where critical mass is reached, leading to a viral effect. Whilst his examples included the fall in crime in New York City in the 1990s and the rise in popularity of Hush Puppies shoes, his views and analysis on the new gTLD programme would be very interesting indeed. What will help us find that tipping point? A few forward thinking brand holders and some clarity from the major search engines on how they plan to handle them would be a good start.

The opportunities for brand holders

Some brand holders saw the opportunities that the gTLD programme could deliver and actually applied to run their own small slice of the internet, registering what is now called a .BRAND. These brands have a huge first mover’s advantage by taking the opportunity that this programme has offered them. The companies that own their own .BRAND currently sit in two camps – those who have a vision and those who acted out of fear, wanting the ultimate protection for their brand on the Internet. Both are valid reasons, but it will be those companies who have defined their future digital strategies who will drive adoption and usage from both companies and consumers alike.

For those brand and marketing managers who take the leap of faith in using their new .BRAND, the rewards could be immense. For example, the UK banking market is highly competitive, with all banks trying to move their traditional business model online, -where technology increases efficiencies and reduces costs with every pound spent. It is also the one sector that is constantly under threat by no-do gooders. Barclays Bank saw the opportunity to invest in their own .BRAND (.barclays and .barclaycard) and is now able to set the standard for secure online banking that others will have to follow.

Another dimension to the new gTLD campaign is the marketing potentials of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) – web address endings which do not use Latin script and use scripts such as Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic. With more than 50% of the world now using keyboards that are not the traditional ASCII, or QWERTY ones, using local language domain names will offer brand owners and marketers the opportunity to speak directly to new markets such as China, India, Russia and Japan. Today, the world is one big global marketplace, open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To take advantage of these new markets, IDNs can allow a company to re-align its brand in some of the fastest growing markets in the world.

It’s not all smoked salmon and champagne

Unfortunately, it is not all smoked salmon and champagne for digital marketers. The new gTLD programme also magnifies the threats that companies have faced online in the last decade. Without a clear strategy on how to take advantage of the programme as well as mitigating the threats, digital marketers could actually be putting their brands at risk

Cybersquatting is an unnecessary evil of the domain name world, but it is preventable. Unfortunately, some brands have made it too easy for bad actors to take advantage of their reputation and existing web traffic by simply not taking any steps to protect themselves. There are a number of Rights Protection Mechanisms that offer cost effective armour in the fight against the digital dragons. The Deloitte-managed Trademark Clearinghouse and the Domain Protected Marks List (DPML) offer very simple and cost effective solutions for brand holders to stop any unwanted attention on their digital assets and should be the first step in a domain name strategy in the new gTLD world.

However, brand holders cannot simply wait until it is too late to secure these domain names. The growth numbers from the first six months of release data suggest that there is a real appetite for the new gTLDs and there is no doubt that we have only just seen the start of the digital revolution.

 

By Stuart Fuller, Director of Commercial Operations and Communications at NetNames.

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