Internet Top Level Domain Names Expanding in a Big Way

June 28th, 2008 by Mike Shannon

Top level domains A few days ago (Thursday, June 26th), Iccan announced they approved a recommendation put forth by it’s stake holders that would allow businesses to purchase or even resell new, custom top level domain names.

What is a top level domain name (tld)?

A top level domain name is the portion of a domain name that appears after the “.”, so for example: if you had “business.com” as your domain then the “com” would be your top level domain name. Icaan is now making it so that new top level domains can exist on the internet like .coke or .water, etc. The new tld’s are expected to be available for purchase sometime in 2009.

Will .com’s become less valuable?

It now seems businesses have many new ways to market their ideas over the internet with an expanded top level space. If you take into consideration that there are already many other alternatives to the .com top level domain, we already know and can conclude that the demand for “.com” domains hasn’t gone down as some of the largest domain resellers, places like godaddy and register.com, still recommend “.com” as a first choice before doing a domain name availability check. As famous domainer Frank Schilling put it:

adding more skim milk to the mix will not stop the cream from rising, and that cream is .com

What does this mean for Search Marketing?

More websites and business ideas will be going up
More people utilizing and depending upon search to find what they need in the expanding fray of websites
Potentially less domain traffic to the .com’s

From all this, you could predict that search will continue to rise and will be needed even more as the domain market becomes further saturated with new businesses ventures. Search engines bring the signal out of the noise that is on the internet which is something I don’t see fading anytime soon.

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 10:07 am and is filed under Best Rank News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Internet Top Level Domain Names Expanding in a Big Way”

Available Domain Names Says:
June 29th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
I agree. I develop a site to find available domain names (domainnamesoup.com) and it’s going to create all sorts of problems. How are they going to control who looks after the new TLDs and the whois entries. What’s to stop them charging extortionate prices?
TLD Managers Says:
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:47 am
@Available Domain Names

These new TLDs will be looked after the same way the current TLDs are, by organizations who are responsible to the management of them. All ccTLDs are owned by the country and managed by a main organization making sure that the DNS and accessibility of the domains is functioning properly. This should not be a major concern on anyone’s mind.

As for pricing, the market will set them. The .me domains just went on sale and they are going for $19.99 a domain/year and GoDaddy moved so many, so fast in one day they had to deal with accidental duplicate purchases.

As for the TLD pricing, that is also up to the market and an ICANN fee. ICANN of course wants to cover their expenses during the application process but they are also going to place popular TLDs up for auction. So, you may see major corporations battling over some highly lucrative top-leve domain names.
Garry Says:
August 24th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Are you kidding me? How many of these TLDs are going to be available? .chicago? .car? .life? .health? .sport? .movie? .book? .school? .newyork? .everything????