In the near future there will be a variety of new top level domains (tld’s) available to register. The big questions on every avid domain buyers mind is… Are they worth registering ? Will they dilute the value of .com’s ?
The answer to these questions is a bit of a mystery, but I will try and shed light on them. Firstly, some of the new tld’s might very well gain popularity. Possible ones such as “.shop” could give consumers more comfort in doing browser type-ins to find what they are looking for since the new tlds will be much more targeted than current ones.
One way to manipulate the new tld’s would be to gain residual traffic to an already established site. Using “.shop” as an example you might register “yourproduct.shop” to redirect visitors to your already established “yourproduct.com”.
As for starting your internet presence from scratch using one of the new tld’s, I don’t recommend it. There will be companies though that will heavily try and brand a site using this method. I can already imagine commercials with sales pitches such as “a different web address for a different kind of company”. To establish a site like that will take some big bucks for advertising. This is the main weakness I see.
All major companies already have their dot com’s somewhat established. Why would big names such as Amazon, Yahoo, Etrade, Monster, etc, care about new, untested tld’s when they have already spent many millions in branding their sites on the most popular tld, dot com. They wouldn’t. These new domains might only be worth registering/developing once a company with some very serious money starts heavily branding the extension into the average surfers mind.
Slightly off topic but important, is that some of the new tld’s worth will try and be inflated by the registry owners. That’s perfectly understandable. They want you to see their tld as very valuable and get you to register as many as possible. I believe a similar strategy went into the sale of Beauty.cc which was sold for 1 million dollars on greatdomains.com. I don’t know all the details but remember hearing it was kind of a publicity scam where the buyer was one of the registry owners or something. As more and more tld’s come out there will be increased tactics of this nature going on. Be smart, and if something seems too good to be true, it is.
As for the question of whether the new tld’s will dilute the value of dot com’s, I don’t see it happening at all. Billions of dollars have been spent putting .com addresses in front of consumers eyes the last 5 years. Dot com’s are what people know and are comfortable with. They aren’t going anywhere. They are the prime cyber real estate and their value will not be affected. Prime real estate just doesn’t go down in value.
The bottom line is that some of the new tld’s may eventually have value and with low registration costs it is more than worth the risk to register some with high type in potential. This is the best strategy for domain buyers and can be summed up as, “Don’t go all out with new tld’s, but don’t be left in the cold either”.
With all the new tld’s that will be probably be available in the next few years it will make the domain scene a bit more interesting, and if you play it right, you could have a new source of type in traffic to supplement your already established and valuable dot com collection.