.AM is Celebrating It's 30th Birthday Today With Plans to Expand Global Use of Armenia's ccTLD

Over 40% of the 362 million domains that have been registered worldwide are ccTLDs (country code top level domains). Yet you don't hear a lot about most of them because there are 308 ccTLDs splitting up the pie. Every one of them has an interesting story of their own though and those stories can vary greatly from one to another. Some are tightly regulated for exclusive use by a given country's citizens. Others are open to all and often re-purposed and marketed for a completely different use than they were created for in the first place - the most visible current example being Anguilla's .ai that is being marketed as a home for artificial intelligence websites.

Since I started my career as a radio broadcaster at a local AM station while still in my teens, the .am extension caught my eye when I entered the domain world 22 years ago. Many of today's stations on both the AM and FM bands simulcast over the Internet, making Armenia's .am one of the many ccTLDs whose letters could serve multiple markets. When I heard that .am was turning 30 today, I knew a couple of people already familiar to many of our readers - Nick Cervantes and Katarina Gevorgyan, who could give us a lot more insight into .am's unique story. 

.AM is administered by the Internet Society of Armenia NGO (ISOC.am). Nick, a retired United States Marine, is an ISOC.am Volunteer and his wife Katarina is the organization's Manager of External Relations, as well as a member of the Board.

Nick Cervantes
ISOC.am Volunteer

Katarina Gevorgyan, Internet Society of Armenia Manager of External Relations and Board Member, with GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani at the 2020 NamesCon Global conference in Austin, Texas.

In addition to helping ISOC.am as a volunteer, Nick, who has a background in Communications and Electronics, does analysis and marketing for the .am  extension on his own through his ArmeniaDomains.com website. He told us "The ISOC Armenia Chapter has a very limited budget, a small handful of sponsors and few investors, probably due to most people not knowing where Armenia is located. It was the first Christian state in the world starting in 301 A.D. and after many wars for its territory and genocide it is now a small landlocked country of around 3 million people between Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Iran." 

With that small population to draw on, .am proponents realize they have to expand their horizons to grow. "We have been working hard promoting  the .am ccTLD both locally and internationally," Nick said. "The local Chapter works mainly locally using the native Armenian language while I  use my English language site to reach the global audience. In conjunction with their 30th birthday, the  .am registry is now ramping up its promotion with a "30" theme, including a series of short YouTube videos under the 30 Facts About .AM banner. The first three are already up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ev0vpAyTaQ  30 facts about .am domain (1-5)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vc3Be4Y1sI&t=49s  30 facts about .am domain (6-10)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1CxANXEs4Q 30 facts about .am domain (11-15)

As additional facts videos are released they will be [posted on the ISOC.am Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ArmenianInternetSociety

On the local front, .am has put the above banners up in the Yerevan, Armenia  Metro stations. (Click banner to see full size).

Nick Cervantes also sees room for .am on the artificial intelligence bandwagon citing AM as a fit for Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning (AM) - A shorter version from (AIML), Artificial Intelligence Metaverse (AM) and Artificial Intelligence Marketing (AM). He has posted additional articles on his site with suggested used cases for .am, asset management being one example.

Nick hasn't forgotten Web3 and Blockchain either, noting "I have put two .am ccTLDs on the new DNS ENS Offchain to show the ISOC.AM chapter that their .am is capable of WEB3. The domains are ArmeniaDomains.am and Pop.am. These are the only 2 known .am ccTLDs put on the new DNS ENS Offchain.  More will be added later and begin creating WEB3 sites in the near future.

The domains can be verified on Etherscan or the ENS APP.

https://etherscan.io/name-lookup-search?id=armeniadomains.am

https://etherscan.io/name-lookup-search?id=pop.am

As far as my original thought that .am would be a natural for radio, it turns out I wasn't the only one thinking that. 17 Major League Baseball teams have .am domains to promote or stream their radio broadcasts, including our own Tampa Bay Rays who use Rays.am as a short link to the complete list of stations on the Rays Radio Network. Further proof for ccTLDs looking to grow that more than one road can get you to your destination. 

(Posted August 26, 2024)   

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