This year I have been receiving a sledgeload of spam emails urging me to register the new TLDs. Todays lot includes the riveting: .directory .technology .contractors .construction .land .today .kitchen
Will I be getting any? No. Does it change my attitude to holding domains? Yes. Result? Divestment. Impact – our clients are doing the same and damaging our business.
We registered our first domains brainsys.com & brainsys.co.uk around 1995. They pointed to different servers on either side of the Atlantic so we didn’t think about it too much at the time. When domains dropped from $80 to $8 it seemed a good idea to register the other brainsys TLDs. We missed out on brainsys.net and that hurt. Then .biz and others starting coming along. Our own portfolio grew. Many of our clients also bagged a whole set.
Yes, we did have all those calls and letters from the USA, Wales and China kindly holding them for us as someone else supposedly wished to register them. But times were good and it was a good little business.
But now it is ridiculous. There is no point to trying to bag the lot. The attempt to blackmail us and our clients is failing. Not only are we not registering new TLDs but these are making our secondary TLDs redundant. We don’t actually need them to operate websites and other services and we are not blocking other people using brainsys or whatever because they can find brainsys.yetanotherTLD now or coming up shortly. So if you have lusting after brainsys.org or brainsys.org.uk your time may come very soon when we let them go.
This cull is typically taking out 50% of our client’s holdings. The upside is that some businesses with a similar name can now get a closer domain (if the domainers don’t get there first). Overall though a business will probably be paying out less in domain fees and secondary TLDs might not get all the trade they expected.