Saturday, July 13, 2019

A .PROVENCE new gTLD coming?

Dixit Wikipedia, "Provence is a geographical region and historical province of southeastern France, which extends from the left bank of the lower Rhône to the west to the Italian border to the east, and is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the south".

Domains ending in .PROVENCE
That is what the website says and it is located here. There is a twitter account too. Checking again, the account was opened in 2015 which means that the project is not so new and actually, I remember travelling to Provence for an old meeting about that project before 2012.

My opinion on such project:
  1. There is no doubt that a .PROVENCE makes a strong sense for the identity of the French Provence: for Tourism and Culture, I am definitely buying. Actually, I am more buying for the Cultural aspect because that is an excellent opportunity to distribute knowledge about this location's culture, in the long term.
  2. For SEO, I am definitely buying too because any company connected to the subject of Provence takes the lead developing another version of its website in another language, using this domain name: 2 websites connecting one to the other is good for their positioning on search engines. Also it often happens that French tourism websites also have an English translation: drop the long URL and use a second domain name. If you have two languages already, maintaining two websites instead of one will not require so much extra work but a few changes.
  3. Sales is where I have a doubt. There are many similar projects and we've learnt that it takes time for end users to come to buy such highly identical domain names. Financing such projects often comes from taxpayers and if I agree to pay taxes to finance such TLDs, I disagree completely when operators/owners of the projects keep using ".com" or ".fr" domain names when they should show the way: shouldn't official websites massively promote such domain names and start with "using them"? What about front pages and newsletters of these official websites: shouldn't they "always" refer to the existence of such domain names and point to their registration? "Don't do what I do, just do what I say".
Tip: did you investigate your Wikipedia pages and add your TLD to them? This is about culture and history too ;-)

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