There are some 250+ top level domains available for use on the Internet today and most of them can be had through your local friendly domain registrar. The list has grown steadily over the past couple decades as more and more countries look to cement their presence on the Internet with their very own TLD. The registry responsible for all this is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) who looks after all the domain names as well as handing out the IP blocks to ISPs and corporations that request them. Whilst it seemed that the TLD space was forever going to be the place of countries and specific industries ICANN recently decided that it would allow anyone who could pony up the requisite $200,000 could have their own TLD effectively opening the market up to custom domain suffixes.
For an individual such a price seems ludicrous so it’s unlikely you’ll see .johndoe type domain names popping up all over the place. For most companies though securing this new form of brand identity is worth far more than the asking price and so many have signed up to do so. ICANN has since released a list of all the requested gTLDs and having a look through it has lead me, and everyone else it seems, to make some interesting conclusions about the big players in this custom TLD space (I made an excel spreadsheet of it for easy sleuthing).
The biggest player, although it’s not terribly obvious unless you sort by applicant name, is the newly founded donuts.co registry which has snagged some 300+ new gTLDs in order to start up its business. Donuts has $100 million in seed capital with which to play with which about 60% will be tied up solely in these domain suffix acquisitions. They all seem like your run of the mill SEO-y type words, being a large grab bag of words that the general public is likely to be interested in but are of no value for specific companies. Every domain also has its own associated LLC which isn’t a requirement of the application process so I’m wondering why they’ve done it. Likely it’s for isolating losses in the less than successful domains but it seems like an awful lot of work to do when that could be done in other ways.
They’re not the only ones doing that either. A quick search of other companies who’ve bought multiple domains although none of them have bought the same number that Donuts has. There also seems to be a few companies that are handling the gTLD for other big name companies ostensibly because they have no interest in actually running the gTLD but are just doing it for their brand identity. The biggest player in this space seems to be CSC Global who strangely enough did all their applications from another domain under their control, CSCInfo. It’s probably nothing significant but for a company that apparently specializes in brand identity you’d wonder why they’d apply with a different domain than their own.
What’s really got everyone going though is the domains that Amazon and Google have gone after. Whilst their war chests of gTLDs aren’t anything compared to Donut’s they’re still quite sizable with Amazon grabbing about 80 and Google grabbing just over 100. Some are taking this as being indicative of their future plans as Amazon has put in for gTLDs like mobile but realistically I can just most of them being augments to their current services (got an app on AWS? Get your .mobile domain today!). There’s also a bit of overlap for most of the popular domains that both these companies have gone after as well and I’m not sure what the resolution process for that is going to be.
While the 2000 odd applications seems to show that there’s some interest in these top level domains the real question of their value, at least for us web oriented folks, is whether the search engines will like them as much as other TLDs. There’s been a lot of heavy investment in current sites that reside on the regular TLDs and apart from marketing campaigns and new websites that are looking for a good name (http://this.movie.sucks seems like it’ll be created in no time) I question how much value these TLDs will bring. Sure there will be the initial gold rush of people looking to secure all the domains they can on these new TLDs but after that will there really be anything in them? Will businesses actually migrate to these gTLDs as their primary or will they simply just redirect them to their current sites? I don’t have answers to these questions but I’m very interested to see how these gTLDs get used.