Friday, May 11, 2018

Why we're adding .APP to our new gTLD report

The "new gTLD reports" are monthly snapshots of new domain name registration volumes according to specific categories of businesses or groups and three of these reports are "special".

3 new gTLD reports are "indicators"
In our list of 17 reports, 3 are slightly different from the 14 others:
  1. The report related to Companies lists the gTLDs in which we believe a company should register its name or trademark with;
  2. The Singular VS Plural reports lists registration volumes but more important, it lists the TLDs that do exist in two versions: singular and plural (ie: ".accountant" and ".accountants";
  3. The Multiple Registries one is an indicator of volumes registered from a group to have acquired several domain name extensions.

Why we're adding .APP to our report for Companies
There are several reasons for this:
  • The cloud application market was valued at $ 52.605 billion in 2017 and is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 14% over the forecast period to reach $115.71 billion by 2023. If numbers remain number, it still means that it is expanding fast. In more simple words, "apps" are adopted and chances are high that more companies either decide to point their website visitors to an application, or even create theirs;
  • Domain names ending in ".app" were massively registered during their General Availability Period and when this happens, the risk increases for a Trademark to have its name squatted; so $20/year to block this from happening is not a prohibitive investment;
  • It is multilingual: you say "app" to qualify an application is many languages worldwide;
  • It's a memorable TLD if you are in the application development business;
  • A SSL certificate is mandatory to use a ".app" domain name and SSL is a sign that security is increased on such a website: demonstration of security increases trust in a company;
  • It's cheap and when domain names are cheap, potential users tend to buy them more and install them;
  • It can be free: we acquired jovenet.app for free (for its first year of registration).
Companies are not concerned by all new extensions but a certain number them. The number one reason why we believe that .APP should be added to our list is that companies are coming to the use of applications and informing about it on a domain name ending in ".app" demonstrates innovation. Of course, application developers are more concerned by this statement.

A hidden reason
There's another hidden reason actually why we think that companies should secure their ".app" domain name...but this one...well, this is what we think: Google operates the .APP new gTLD and it is also a search engine; not "a" search engine actually but "the" search engine most of the world uses. Google decides what can be best indexed on its own platform. When informing about a content related to applications AND using a SSL certified website (recently advertised by Google to give a ranking boost to secure https/ssl websites), we think that using a ".app" domain name will rank better in search engine results.

The latest new gTLD report for Companies is available here.

.BRAND new gTLD Reports are updated once a month: CLICK HERE !