If you thought the introduction of .co and .me were big news, you should buckle up. Domain registrars are now rolling out the new TLDs (top-level domains). There are literally hundreds of domain name extensions being added, and some are already available for purchase today. So instead of the common .com you might be using .guru, .photography, .agency, and many many more.
Here’s the list, just to get an idea of the number of new domain extensions. I’m sure you’ll find one that’s relevant.
(Click to reveal the full list, or visit Namecheap)
Why new TLDs?
The use of .com was to designate the site as commercial, but the Internet has had the ideal domain names scooped up by other businesses or squatters. These new TLDs are both more descriptive as well as offering more options in finding an available URL that suits a business the best.
What does this mean for businesses?
Businesses should keep in mind that everyone has been trained to use com/org/net, and introducing a new convention is always met with some resistance as it starts to catch on and visitors learn about the new domains. It might be wise to get the .com variant of the domain just in case as someone told to visit wedding.photography might end up going to weddingphotography.com as a mistake.
The new TLDs are being rolled out so domain registrars such as Namecheap and GoDaddy (among others) are offering to send you alerts as they become available. They also provide the option to preorder at an additional cost in an attempt to reserve the domain before it’s officially made available for public sale.
Internet marketing and search engine optimization have domain strategy as an essential component, and new extensions make a huge number of options available for this now and in the future.
What does this mean for consumers & the general public?
It might take a second to see “jones.plumming” and immediately relate that it’s a website URL. Hopefully services/businesses will be auto-linking these so they just work when click/tapped, or they still format them with the familiar http://jones.plumming trapping.
It’s opening a huge opportunity to get the name you want for everyone, but the adoption of having people know about the new names is something that should be taken into account (definitely when presenting it in an non-interactive medium).