Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Interview: Ten Years Between New gTLD Applications Is Too Long

This is an interview from David Goldstein: Domain Pulse Q&A With Jovenet Consulting’s Jean Guillon. If interested in new gTLDs, I strongly suggest that section from Domain Pulse entitled "New gTLDs"
Dismay at the time it’s taking for ICANN to launch a new round of new gTLD applications is an underlying theme for Jovenet Consulting’s Jean Guillon in today’s Domain Pulse Q&A, as well as it’s the insiders who are framing the new applicant guidebook and the larger companies are the ones with the resources to put into submitting applications from an anticipated overly complicated applicant guidebook. But it’s not all dismay as Jean is excited about the future of new gTLDs, the .BEST registry, and he has a French city waiting to apply for its own gTLD and he believes he’s worked out what works and doesn’t.

Questions asked by Domain Pulse:

  1. What were the highlights, lowlights and challenges of 2019 in the domain name industry, both for you and/or the industry in general?
  2. What are you looking forward to in 2020?
  3. What challenges and opportunities do you see for the year ahead?
  4. How have new gTLDs fared in 2019?
  5. What progress do you see on a new round of applications for new gTLDs in 2020?
  6. What one thing would you like to see addressed or changed in the domain name industry?
Read the full interview here.

New gTLDs for Photography: 2019 in Review

Photography is very much present on Internet: the web is a great way to introduce visual elements to a public. For this reason probably there are so many new domain name extensions dedicated to photography. I listed 25 of them and here is what I noticed in 2019:
  • There are seven .BRANDs and most popular photography Trademarks are represented: .CANON - .NIKON .PANASONIC and the .SONY new gTLD. Surprisingly, one Trademark withdrew its application (a long ago): the .OLYMPUS new gTLD.
  • By the way, CANON is launching this in April 2020 and it is the most active photography .BRAND new gTLD in terms of usage: it added 10 new domain names to its total of registrations since January. Canon uses 48 personalized domain names.
  • Did you notice: isn't .CAM is very close to .COM? I 'd consider such extension in terms of Brand Protection.
  • Three TLDs have more than 50,000 domain name creations (and increasing) and .ART is number one from that list with a total of 72,703 domain names registered. It had 44,920 in January.
  • Three domain name extensions are very similar: .PHOTOGRAPHY - .PHOTO and .PHOTOS : these similar new gTLDs can become a nightmare in terms of strategy if you forget to buy...the three of them for the same second level domain you planned to use. Let me explain: if you buy whatever.photo and forget to register whatever.photography and whatever.photos, chances are high that a third party will do it in the future. This is a risk in terms of Brand Protection.
  • All nine TLDs above 10,000 domain name registrations (but one) had more domains created in December than in January: that is a positive sign, adoption is coming. The .DIGITAL and .VIDEO are some of them.
  • Nine extensions from that list did not maintain their registration level from January to December and .WEBCAM, which started the year with a total of 54,270 domain names created, only had 5,773 in December...
  • I see some sort of competition between .FILM which ended the year with 4,511 registrations and .MOVIE (3,268 registrations). We would use the word "film" in French, but not in Spanish. English speaking person would use "movie" I guess. French tend to use complete stupid names with hyphens sometimes so I guess that the movie industry should be approached in France.
  • There is a .MOV (for movie I guess) operated by Google but it sticks to 2 domain name creations. I would be Google, I'd use for the Movie section of YouTube. Hey wait! There is a .YOUTUBE and a .TUBE too.
  • My opinion on why .PICS does not meet with adoption is that the meaning of the string is already too old: worldwide bandwidth now allows to have fast access to media content, aren't "pics" kind of old now?
  • I like .FILM, come on dotFilm, open a virtual branch in France, there is space for you ;-)
Read the full report here.

Coming: "New gTLDs for Catering (and Culinary): 2019 in Review"

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