New Extensions at Tech Giants

This week Apple used their corporate .apple new domain extension in promotion of their new iPhone models. This got a lot of attention in both the technology and domain communities. I think the real excitement should focus on the fact that they used a domain name phrase, and not simply on the use of a branded new extension.  I will expand on that idea in a future post.

It is sometimes overlooked that the biggest technology companies, not surprisingly, have been using new domain extensions in a variety of ways for some time. In this post I look at new domain extension use by Apple, Amazon,  Google, Facebook and Netflix. I think there are some lessons for both marketing professionals and domain investors in these examples.

Apple

Apple of course has its own  branded .apple new extension.  While Experience.Apple is only the second meaningful use of the branded extension yet, clearly it has great potential for all manner of catchy domain name phrases. There are endless two or three word phrases such as create.with.apple to simply.apple that are possible.

But Apple has also for some time used many other new domain extensions.  A number of these were for simple redirection,  for example Apple.site, Apple.website and Apple.xyz all redirect to the main site.  A few other new extensions are used by Apple  in a more targeted way such as Apple.news (that not surprisingly goes to their corporate news site) and Apple.technology that takes you to their developer resources.

Amazon

Amazon use a huge number of different new extensions, and I just touch on a few of them in this section.  It is actually a lot of fun trying different  ngTLDs with the word Amazon! A number of new extensions including .fit, .forsale, .guide, .life, .online,  .rocks, .site, .space, .world, .xyz and many more just direct you to the main Amazon website.  Amazon also use redirects to their main website for extensions such as .date, .fund, .loan, .loans and .science where the fit is arguably more contrived. They are missing some obvious ones, since .fun, .life and .icu don't resolve so supposedly are not at time of writing controlled by Amazon.

However, Amazon also makes more specific, and interesting, use of some of the other new extensions. Amazon.dog takes you to a page with everything from dog treats to dog beds to books about dogs. Amazon.Christmas, as you guessed, highlights Christmas crafts and decorations. They naturally use the .boats extension for all your boating needs. Amazon do make use of the .lgbt extension, but not in an apparent way to highlight resources for the LGBT community. Amazon.today takes you to today's deals. You might wonder what Amazon.horse takes you to - try it! Wonder where they would take you at the .wtf extension? Try it to find out!

Unlike Apple, Google and Netflix, Amazon does not yet have their own branded .amazon ngTLD, although they have been battling for years to secure it.  They are currently trying to placate objections from those  associated with the Amazon region of the world. You can read about some of the twists and turns in that here.

Google

It is well known that Alphabet,  the parent company of Google, use the new extension domain name abc.xyz for their corporate website.

Google also own the rights to a number of different extensions, and of course had the very successful .app extension release earlier this year.  The other active extensions in general availability that they operate are much less well known, extensions such as .soy.  They have also for some time operated an internationalized character domain extension that in the Japanese language means 'everyone'.  Several of the extensions they have that will soon come into general availability such as .dev and .page are likely to have a significant impact on the domain world. You can keep track of the extensions they operate at https://www.registry.google/.

Unlike Amazon, or even Apple, Google seem not to have put in use many ngTLDs for redirection purposes.

Google do have their own brand as an extension .google. As noted  earlier, they use that for information on the extensions they offer.  They also make use of it for a corporate blog, as a launch site for finding and registering domain names,  and for their artificial intelligence site.

Facebook

I like what Facebook does using the .design ngTLD.  At Facebook.design you find a set of articles and videos by members of the Facebook design team. They have also have a set of resources for technology designers who are writing code to interact with Facebook.  They even have a link for those who want to apply for a position in design at Facebook. Amazon also uses a .design extension, in a similar mode, but it is a pretty sparse site compared to the Facebook one.

Netflix

As far as I could tell, Netflix make limited use of new domain extensions.  However they do use the .film extension, although it simply redirects to their main Netflix site for your country.  They could have very effectively used different extensions to point to collated resources in different topics, as Amazon does.  Of course Netflix have their own branded ngTLD, although so far the use is limited.

Discussion

I don't see any of these companies ever abandoning their .com (and multiple country redirects) and  going to only a new domain extension.  I do expect they, and other companies, will increasingly use the new domain extensions in catchy domain name phrase marketing.  I hope that more will adopt creative use of multiple extensions along the Amazon line, or do something effective in highlighting a branch of their operation as Facebook do with the .design extension.

Sometimes casual domain observers look only at the main site, and assume that the business is not using new domain extensions.  As this has demonstrated, most large companies own and  use hundreds or thousands of domains.  The use of new extensions in certain niches of their operation is very common among the biggest technology companies.  Com may well be king, but the royal court has a lot of minor players making things varied and interesting!

Please add to comments interesting new extension use by the technology giants that I left out!

Links:

• Experience.Apple link
• 9to5 Mac Article
• DomainInvesting Article on Apple Promotion
• Apple.news
• Apple.technology
• Amazon.dog
• Amazon.Christmas
• Amazon.today
• abc.xyz
• Get.app
• registry.google
• blog.google
• AI.google
• Facebook.design
• Amazon.design
• Netflix.film
• Our site NamesThat.win - thanks for visiting
• Permanent link to this blog post

Original post Sept 22, 2018.
Slight revision Oct 3, 2018 to give information re Netflix brand ngTLD, and the dispute with respect to .amazon.

Disclosure:  I currently hold a number of  ngTLD domain names. I am  not associated  (except as a customer) with any of the technology companies named in this report.  The icons of those companies are registered trademarks by them.

Fine Print

This post is offered for informational and educational purposes only, and should not be considered domain name investment advice. While an attempt has been made to be accurate, there is no implied or explicit warranty, and you are responsible for verifying any information of importance to you. You also accept full responsibility for any domain investing decisions you may make.

I try to be fair, balanced and objective in my analysis.  If you feel this post does not meet that standard, please express your concerns to me. 

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My Most Visited Domain on Undeveloped - Photon.gdn

I was recently offline for a couple of weeks, and when I returned I noticed that I had a new "most visited" domain name on my Undeveloped portfolio (my overall portfolio contains about 200 domain names).  One nice feature of Undeveloped is that it tracks how many visits each domain name gets. If you have the DNS pointed to Undeveloped, then a user typing in the exact full domain name will be counted as a visit, as will someone searching within Undeveloped and clicking on that domain name from the list of domains presented.  Undeveloped do not count visits to your own domains while you are editing your portfolio. You can have a display of visits displayed for potential purchasers if you wish.

Anyway, back to the story.  For the first time since I have been using Undeveloped, a .gdn (global domain name) had rocketed to first place in the most visited category, and by a dominant lead.  The name? photon.gdn  Now I am not sure exactly when I set my DNS to point to Undeveloped for this domain, but as the graph here shows that the uptick in visits over the past month is impressive. Keep in mind that this is not a list of searches on the word photon (which would be in the tens of millions per month), but actually typing in exactly photon.gdn.

Given that the global domain name extension is not that well known, this is especially surprising.  This is the first time that a .gdn has been in the top 5 most visited list on my Undeveloped portfolio. As a sidelight, another .gdn domain name also appeared on my most visited list, BCTech.gdn, but I had dome some promotion of this name in conjunction with recent British Columbia technology announcements and events, so that is perhaps not so surprising.  Up to now, I had done zero promotion of photon.gdn, so it rose to first place all by itself.

When I purchased the domain name photon.gdn some months ago, as a physicist I did recognize that it is a pretty special word. Much of my research career was based on making sense of astronomical objects from the photons they emitted or reflected. The photon is the quanta of light, that is the smallest energy packets that light comes in.  I am using the word light loosely here, and actually the word photon applies to any kind of electromagnetic radiation, from microwave to infrared to visible to X-ray to gamma ray. A photon of ultraviolet radiation has more energy than a photon of visible light, and that is why exposure to ultraviolet radiation carries more biological risk.

Photon is therefore one of the most important words in science.  But it also is of huge importance in industry, especially in communications. The industry of photonics essentially deals with doing with light what used to be accomplished using electronics (photons replacing electrons).  A single fibre-optic cable can simultaneously carry a huge number of voice transmissions (or other types of data).  The National Centre for Photonics and Optics Education have a nice introduction to photonics here. From communications to medicine, signal processing to imaging, photonics is changing our world.

Even among new extension domain investors, I admit there is not a lot of familiarity or enthusiasm for gdn, and I think that is unfortunate.  I am somewhat contrarian in my view of the extension, and do see significant value and potential.  The idea of gdn was a global domain name - i.e. rather than using a .uk or a .de or a .ca,  a company that operated in multiple countries, but did not want to use multiple country code extensions or a new or legacy other top level domain, might choose gdn. I say company, but the idea for gdn has always been inclusive of any business, individual, site, or organization

I like the premise for the extension .gdn.  Even though there are a significant number of registered domains in the extension (about 100,000 according the NameStat data), I find that occasionally great single generic words can still be found to register (in most cases these have been held previously but allowed to drop by a domain investor).  As with many of the new extensions, discount pricing has hurt the extension, and resulted in the usual dip after the one year period following cheap registrations ended. Pricing seems to have stabilized in the last year (the extension has been generally available for a bit under three years).  If you look at NameStat data there is one Alexa top 1M website using the extension for every 1400 registrations, which is actually pretty positive. As comparators, the .app extension is about one for every 4000 registrations, and the leading new extension .top has one Alexa top 1M for every 2600 currently (you can find this information for yourself for any global extension using Namestat).

The extension has, not surprisingly, most registrations in the US, although the geographic spread is pretty healthy (see graph based on NameStat data). There are registrations from 111 different countries. I think that for a name that claims to be global it is important to have significant registrations in both the US and China, as well as developed and developing countries in various parts of the world. The extension passes this test.

One aspect I look at when considering the viability of a domain extension is which registrars handle it, and how expensive and stable renewal rates are.  In the case of .gdn, major registrars including Alpnames, Dynadot, Epik, Gandi, Namecheap and OVH all offer renewals at about $12 or less. You can find the best deals on any domain extension (for registration, transfer or renewal) at https://tld-list.com/.

I decided to try to figure out why the specific domain name photon.gdn had suddenly rocketed to first place among my Undeveloped portfolio domains.  As a starting point I did a Google search on gdn photon.  The results are shown in the screen capture.  I was somewhat surprised (and pleased) to see that the leading search result pointed to the technology section of the domain name catalog at my website.   Also the third entry is the Undeveloped lander for the domain name, which may help explain the number of people landing there.

I think if you look down through the other links and image search, though, another clue is offered regarding the popularity of photon.gdn.  I won't go into the technical details, but GdN is a semiconductor material used in the photonics industry. In this case by serendipity the extension abbreviation is the same as the scientific abbreviation for a related term.  When this happens, there are definitely advantages in search engine optimization, yes for the lander for the domain but more importantly to a future holder of the domain name.

As a domain name investor, I had to decide how to respond to the new popularity of one of my domain names.  While the name had received lots of visits in the month, there were no offers made to purchase the domain name.  Up until a few days ago I had no price set for this particular domain name, and it was simply listed with make an offer on Undeveloped (or through my Efty Marketplace).  I had three options: leave it that way and wait for an offer, set a fairly high but it now (BIN) price and hope that the popularity would lead to a major sale, or set a modest BIN and hope to quickly sell the domain name.  I do realize there are sound arguments for all three choices, but my primary interest is to see domain names, especially scientific and technical ones, get into use on websites, so I decided to set a modest BIN.  Simply enter the domain name into any browser to see that price (assuming that it has not yet sold at the time you read this), or easier yet use this link. The good folks at Undeveloped will efficiently and securely handle your payment and promptly transfer ownership of the domain name to you.

It will be interesting to see if having a BIN price will result in a sale or offer.  The research done by Undeveloped suggests that having a BIN price, having the lander at Undeveloped, and showing your full profile as a seller all help in getting sales.

PS In case you are wondering, some of the other domain names which have been in the top 5 most visited of my Undeveloped portfolio over the past few months are listed here.  These are not necessarily my most interesting or valuable domain names, and some have DNS pointing to Undeveloped and others do not, so the comparison is skewed by that.  Click (or enter in browser) any domain name to go to the lander for it.

• BCTech.gdn
• bitcoiner.top
• debut.world
• NanoAZ.com
• MedicalCRISPR.com
• risky.space
• tweets.today