Legal Marketing & PR

Get your Own .paperstreet or .yourcompany for only 50,000 Euros. Ugh.

By Peter Boyd

Wow, I thought I had seen it all in domains. You too can now own your own .com, except it would be .paperstreet or .yourcompany.

I have had clients come to us with 500+ domains for a single web site and I have had clients not want to have a domain for their site. I have had clients pay six-figure sums for a domain and others who pick up domains for $10.

I have even argued with a South Korean domain holder for the rights to PaperStreet.com.  I ultimately won the debate that our soccer team was better than theirs (2002 World Cup); and how Apollo Anton Ano kicked their butt in speed skating.  Fun Story.

However, the relatively new Unified Root TLD takes the cake.  Yes, you can own your own TLD for the low, low price of EUR 50,000.

What is a TLD you ask? Why should I need one?

It’s the ability to have your own root level domain (top-level domain).  Basically we could have .paperstreet, instead of using a .com.  So we could have web.paperstreet as the actually address of our site.  You could register anything you like from .fun, to .stupid, to .law, to whatever you want.  Then you can put a regular term in front of it.  So if I purchased the .law TLD, lawyers could have:

marbury.law
madison.law
yourfirmname.law

Nice and short, but will it work? It’s interesting in theory.  However, in practicality this has a couple of hurdles in order to succeed.

1.  Registry Key Change Required - Anytime a software download is required to view a site, you limit your audience.

In order to see these cool domains, you must change your registry of your computer to detect these networks.   UnifiedRoot, the provider of the TLDs,  is nice enough to provide a program for you.  Yes, the download is easy to install and you can get it here.  However, how many people are really going to install the software.  Unless it becomes default on all browsers and computers, this will not take off.

2.  Register Key Did not Work - At least for me, the registry key change did not work. I downloaded the software, ran it, and it said it installed.  I even double checked and it did change something in the registry.  However, even on reboot, I could not see any of the sites listed on this page. Now perhaps that is because I was using Firefox and it seems to be protecting me by not allowing me to visit those sites such as 1800.flowers (note the lack of the .com).  Of course, this should work and work 100% of the time.

3.  Cost. The cost is very, expensive except for probably the top businesses or entrepreneurs.  It costs EUR 50,000 to register and 12,500 EUR to maintain each year.  That is a lot of money, considering that you can pick up a domain for less than $10.

4.  Confusion. It’s took years to get clients to know what a .com domain was.  It was hard enough to get clients to remember a domain, now we are asking them to rethink the entire process.  Don’t type in the .com.  Don’t type in .org or the final extension.  People are so used to this, it may be too much for them to handle.  Consider a TV, Radio, or Print ad (heck even a banner ad on Google). You simply put web.paperstreet  or fly.delta at the top of your ad.  Sounds pretty cool, but I bet some people will think its a mistake and just type in the .com anyways.

5.  Search Engines. I am not sure how search engines are going to treat these domains.  Are they going to index them the same? This is an area of research that needs to be verified.

Conclusion
Of course, I could be wrong on all of this.  The new TLDs could get with Microsoft, Apple, Firefox, Opera, and other software companies and get their registry code embeded in their software.  They could speak to all major search providers and get them to guarantee indexing of the domains.  They could do a advertising push to web developers and the world in general to pick up on this idea and that a .com is not needed.  Then they could lower the cost to say $1,000 and allow all businesses to register their own TLDs.

This then could be a pretty cool idea.

Full post as published by PaperStreet Web Design: SpeakOut on April 09, 2009 (boomark / email).