All these new TLD's, worth purchasing?


tekiegreg

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So scrolling through GoDaddy's domain offerings today I see all sorts of wonderful TLD's now some amusing entries are:

 

.CAMP for only $39.99/year (really, REALLY if I'm running a summer camp or something similar, I'd spend 4x the amount of a .com for a .camp?)

.CODES for $69.99/year (I just have no words...)

.COFFEE for $39.99/year (again...)

 

Is any of this truly worth it? Anyone purchased one of the more "niche" TLD's and had any success with generating traffic for .coffee for example?  Or is .COM/.NET/.ORG likely to be the gold standard for sometime to come.  Thoughts, opinions?

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Fantastic question! I love talking about these new TLDs!

 

We've seen some adoption for these new TLDs, and admittedly from both a host/registrar perspective and as a consumer they have their place. Early adoption is still slow based on all the stats I've seen but one thing to keep in mind, at one point all TLDs were considered new (and possibly unnecessary). Back when .me was launched for example, everyone thought it would breakthrough as the next .com and we all know how that went.

 

The traffic generation aspect is interesting because there is a lot of speculation on how Google/Bing/Yahoo will weigh any given TLD in their search rankings. Would a site like summer.camp show up higher in a search result than summercamp.com, assuming they have similar content? Does summer.camp get ranked higher because of the relevant TLD even with a less established presence/content? Search engines have always adjusted results based on usage/popularity, such as .org losing credibility as people started using it for SEO purposes when the .com/.net wasn't available. That starts to devalue the .org TLD since you can no longer be guaranteed it actually *is* an organization, it may just be an SEO network generating content for advertising/clicks.

 

In my personal opinion (and I'm sure some of our other guys disagree with me), it's a good thing for the industry. When (if) adoption takes off, I see the potential for a lot of creative use of unique TLDs. Specifically for localized ones (chess.nyc for your NYC chess club, chess.la for your LA chess club, etc), restaurants, tourism (travel.london, travel.tokyo, etc), cars (bmw.cars, jaguar.cars, hell even down to specific models like xj.jaguar.cars)...the list goes on and on.

 

I firmly believe .com will remain the gold standard for the foreseeable future, but it will lose some market share to 5-10 of these new TLDs that become commonplace.

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