Fierce CIO posted an article by Gary McIlraith CEO of NetNames with regards to a study they undertook. “Internet 2020: An Analysis of How New gTLDs Will Transform the Internet,”
The study seemed a bit too .com defeatist imo, certainly in six years it makes sense that some new gtlds will have taken hold, what that means for the many participants in the name space is a greater mystery. The author discusses only a 4% growth rate of new applications for .coms, seems like an odd way to phrase that as there are not really applications. The other point this overlooks is that .com dominates aftermarket sales.
Legendary domain investor David Castello did leave a comment which I think was spot on:
Good article and I believe many of these new gTLDs will gain traction, but the idea that dotCom will ever be “out of fashion” is somewhat ludicrous. DotCom is the most popular worldwide TLD brand and will remain so for many years to come. Many of these new gTLDs are in English or another language and have little relevancy outside of their respective native speaking countries. At their most popular potential, some may outperform some of the ccTLDs, but none will reach a fraction of dotCom’s popularity and usage.
From the article:
The report, titled “Internet 2020: An Analysis of How New gTLDs Will Transform the Internet,” reflects on the implications of the first wave of new domain name suffixes or gTLDs–replacements for .com, to the right of the dot–which began to hit the ether waves at the turn of 2014.
There are many changes afoot on the internet. The steady decline in growth of new applications for .coms, now just 4 percent, is both a reflection of the saturation of that piece of internet real estate and the incentive for ICANN to open the doors for applications for new gTLDs, or generic top level domains.
To date, there have been just shy of 2 million registrations for new gTLDs, and over 600 businesses opting to register for a .BRAND domain name. Online opportunities abound for local communities and businesses of all stripes.
Remote as it may sound right now, .coms could well be out of fashion by 2020, shifting a lot of consumer energy–including advertising budget–toward the new suffixes (gTLDs).
Read the full article on Fierce CIO
.com is not going anywhere at least not in the US. maybe some of these Geos maybe some of these IDN related Tlds. for English speakers in the US .com will continue to be the dominant extension.
I found the piece to be slanted toward new g’s, Mister Castello is exactly right, .com is not going out of fashion.
They’ve posted my comment over at Fierce CIO; but in case it winds up deleted after coming into contact with human eyeballs, Raymond, you can have it:
“A litmus test for any summary discussion of new TLDs is whether the author acknowledges the high proportion of bogus domain registrations on the part of registries like .XYZ, which were intended to inflate numbers and conjure a spurious impression of market demand. That scandal has been widely discussed in every major domain industry publication since June. Therefore if this author is content to pass over it without even a mention, then everything in this article ought to be suspect.
Propaganda like this may be titillating, but it is nearly a year behind the times. Optimistic gut reactions from cherry-picked non-expert consumers in response to leading questions are not facts. And polling a non-random sample of customers never was any substitute for industry research or analysis.”
What I need is fact. There’s no evidence yet that shows the demise of .com. Techcrunch and Gigaom still report startups in US and other countries adopting .com.
.com’s will always be on the top of domain list… yeah new gtlds made some difference in internet world but that will not cause any harm to .com’s.