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Don't
look now but another new TLD land rush is underway.
This one, kicked off this morning by the .tel
registry, is unlikely to resonate with many
domain investors though. You cannot build a website on a
.tel domain, nor place ads on one to monetize it. Also,
with land rush registration prices ranging from $295-$375
(depending on the registrar) per domain for
the required minimum registration period of three
years you would also be hard pressed to resell one
for a profit.
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contact info on the web.
You can see a live example of a .tel domain at Justin.tel,
which is owned by the registry's Communications
Director, Justin Hayward, whom I met at
DOMAINfest Global last week in Hollywood,
California.
Costs for .tel domains will
drop dramatically when the land rush ends and the
standard registration period begins March 24 (to
approximately $30 for a three-year registration).
We will get a better indication then of how many people
have an interest in using it. I can see some logic in
the .tel idea but the extension has some enormous
hurdles to overcome. Unless the registry spends big
money on marketing (something previous new TLD
registries has show no inclination to do) how is the
general public to know that .tel is the place to look
for contact info (or that it even exists)?
Relying on search engines
alone will not get it done, as the lack of
recognition for other new extensions that have been on
the market (with little impact) for as long as seven
years has already shown. The key, as with other TLDs,
will be getting massive numbers of people to use the
extension so that the TLD (and its purpose) becomes
familiar to the general public. That is way easier said
than done - especially when they are so many other
places already available to post contact information
including existing websites and free social media
platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.). I
would personally like to see .tel succeed as it would be
nice if contact info could be consistently found on a
single platform, but the history of new TLDs leaves me
skeptical about that happening.
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Last
month we told you about a free webinar that BuyDomains
was presenting January 29th to teach small
businesses how they can benefit from using Google
Anlaytics. More than 400 companies and
individuals registered for that webinar and
others wanted to take part but couldn't because
of scheduling conflicts. |
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To accommodate
those who missed the Jan. 29 session, BuyDomains
has scheduled a second live webinar for February
10th at 2pm (U.S. Eastern time). Again there
will be no charge to sit in - all you
need to do is sign up, which you can do through this
link. |
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