Many of you already saw the article from the Wall Street Journal named Web Domains Could Expand Broadly Under New Plan.
If not, in short it says, the company that manages the domain names, ICANN, said they will be offering a plan for companies and organizations to purchase their own TLD (top level domain). A told level domain is the .com or .net or .co.il portion of the domain name. So www.cartoonbarry.com’s TLD is the .com. Now, I do not own the .com portion, I own the cartoonbarry portion.
ICANN is structuring a way to allow the sale of TLDs. So if IBM wanted their own TLD, they can get .ibm. If New York City wanted their own TLD, they can get .nyc. But it doesn’t come cheap. The Wall Street Journal said the “cost somewhere between $100,000 and $500,000.”
It isn’t a crazy or unreasonable price. I say, we (SEOs & SEMs) pool together funds under an organization (SEMPO?) to purchase .SEO and .SEM (.SMO for socials?). What you think? Worth it? Think Google will ban the .seo TLDs before they even come out? 😉
“Think Google will ban the .seo TLDs before they even come out? ;-)” LOL!
That was the first thought that popped into my mind as I read your post…
.com will still reign supreme IMHO
So whats the buy in your thinking? How much investment to be part of the group to own the TLD? THese are questions that need answered! I agree with David though, .com will still own be where to be.
No need to pool and buy TLDs – ICANN is planning on giving them away for free: http://www.icann.com/en/announcements/announcement-4-26jun08-en.htm
Now, it just comes down to getting approved and then managing the registration of all the domain requests.
I would have to agree with David on the marketing value being low with all of the new TLDs.
IMO I would say if this happens we will see a pretty large shift in the value of having a well optimized name.
That would be good, to have a name with .seo on it. Although, I do agree that they would all be penalized straight away. Let me know if anything actually comes of this.
I am looking forward to this coming out. I am unsure if the .seo would be penalized though. What about seo related keywords. I wonder if seo.seo would do the trick. It could be duplicate content. HAHA. Ok that was lame!
I’m in. You going to take the reighns and organize the fund? I am in it to win it. I know many SEO’s would love that. Just have to make sure the guy who TM’d “SEO” loses his battle.
Can anyone advise of a good search engine optimisation company? there seems to be a flood of them, some people say use who shows up first in the search engines when you type in seo which kind of makes sense but I’m not sure. Any help or advice would be appreciated. I’ll check back regular for responses.