By Kelli B. Grant
The World Wide Web is getting wider with the addition of new top-level domains this year, but experts say businesses and marketers may find that grabbing new options won?t do much good. The .com ending for Internet addresses still rules.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known as Icann, the nonprofit that oversees domain-name systems, plans to introduce more extensions in mid-2013. Among those under consideration are general domains like .baseball and .eat, as well as brand-specific ones like .Chevrolet and .Netflix. Some bids have come under scrutiny, however. Industry groups the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, as well as retailer Barnes & Noble, have objected to Amazon?s application for domains including .book and .author, according to The Wall Street Journal. Allowing Amazon that control would be anticompetitive, they argue. In theory, Amazon would license, say, MarketWatch.book, to whichever company thinks to buy it from them first. Critics, however, are concerned that Amazon doesn?t intend to resell domains using the new suffix. See: Amazon?s quest for Web names draws foes.
Regardless of who wrests control, the new domains are years from meaning much to consumers. Search-engine algorithms favor whoever has the .com address, says Ed Mayuga, a partner at St. Louis-based marketing firm AMM Communications. Plus, most consumers will try the .com site first, whether it?s the right Web address or not. ?We are fixated on .com,? says Larry Chiagouris, professor of marketing at Pace University?s Lubin School of Business in New York. ?It?s like how people have become conditioned to go to Google for a Web search. Only then do we try Yahoo or Bing, if Google isn?t getting us what we want.?
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That could change, he says, but it?ll take five to 10 years and a heavy marketing effort by big brands using the domains. Even then, the .com suffix is likely to still live on, says Jack Vonder Heide, president of consulting firm Technology Briefing Centers. And many domains won?t catch on at all, he says. ?I really don?t see a lot of passion about any of these alternate domains, with the exception of .xxx, and that seems to be in their own circle of businesses.? says Vonder Heide.
So why the rush to expand the Web? Brands are staking their claim as a preventative measure, to make sure they secure their image and prevent fraud, says Mayuga. That doesn?t require actually using the domain. (Think cyber-squatting, but on a pricier scale; it costs $185,000 for each top-level domain name application to Icann.) Many applicants may be planning to profit by letting Web users register second-level domains (such as the MarketWatch portion of MarketWatch.com), Vonder Heide says. For example, Polynesian island nation Tuvalu contracted with Verisign in 2000 to lease its .tv top-level domain to individual users. A .tv site now goes for $39.99 per year on a registrar like GoDaddy.com.
Source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-com-the-212-area-code-of-domains-2013-03-12
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