ICANN voted today to allow the expansion of Vanity TLDs (vTLD’s coined by David Castello) offered.  Its guestimated that the registration for someone to get rights to .whateveryouwant will be in the 100k range and those who are interested will have to go through an application process.  From what I have read, it seems like local Cities will be the biggest spenders (.losangeles).

What this means to Domainers

There is going to be a serious gold rush and some are quoting that this will be the most dramatic expansion of virtual real estate in 40 years - which I agree.

What this means to Business Owners

Finding a good domain name is hard to come across these days.  Early pioneers were early to catch on (about the time I was getting sick of seeing www . com in movie theaters) by grabbing up nice domains and big companies with big pockets swooped up the rest.

This will be a giant opportunity to brand your company.

What this doesn’t mean

.com’s will fall as a preferred choice for companies/internet users.  We all know that .travel didn’t work out too well and .mobi is in the same boat.  .com’s will be, and will always be, the preferred TLD.  There is no comparison between www.losangeles.com and whatever.losangeles and there never will be.

What you should know

Trademarks will not be automatically reserved. But there will be an objection-based mechanism for trademark owners where their arguments for protection will be considered.

In short, make sure you have your ducks in a row.

There will be a limited application period where any established entity from anywhere in the world can submit an application that will go through an evaluation process.

In short, if you have the money, you can do great things.

When is this going to happen

ICANN is working towards accepting the first applications in the second quarter of 2009.

Summary

It’s going to flood the Search Engines with a bunch of crap. I don’t think the availability of the current 21 TLD’s limits the number of people on the web with a website.  This means savvy business owners will rush to get these vTLD’s and either drop their current site or create new sites with duplicate content.

On the other hand, I think there will be some mid-size companies that will get inspired to grow or seek investment due to the branding capabilities of these vTLD’s.

More Reading

Vanity TLDs (vTLD) Approved

Technorati Tags: domain names, premium domain names, ICANN, domains

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I signed up for Microsoft Google Alerts a few weeks back to follow the possible purchase of Yahoo (too bad) and forgot to take off the alert.  As a result, I am learning tons and tons about Microsoft daily.

Today,  I got the following alert:

So I am thinking - cool, maybe they have something here…As a gmail user, I figure maybe I can catch a few vanity emails for fun to have in addition to my gmail account.

Not only does the link to the alert take me to an ad that requires you to click to skip or wait 15 seconds (good for the publisher but I am sick of them) the email isn’t available from Yahoo yet.  The article leads with :

“Yahoo is offering two new e-mail domains for free to users in addition to its familiar @yahoo.com handle. The two new e-mail domains, @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com, are calculated to increase the number of people registering for free e-mail addresses with Yahoo.”

I get excited and figure I’d better hurry up and get my truman@ymail.com email address so I type “ymail.com” into my browser and low and behold I get a brilliant message:

WTF kind of stupid message is this?  “Bummer…”  It’s like a 60 year old told a 22 year old programmer to sit down with him/her and come up with some cool message that can be displayed.  This is what they came up with?  It’s nothing personal???  “My hot little hands…”  What, you think you are cool?  Wow..

Here’s the stats on the number of users for the top 3 for those who are interested:

 ”According to a comScore Inc. report from April 2008 cited by AP, Yahoo has the largest share of e-mail users at 266 million worldwide. Microsoft is second with 264 million users. Google ranks behind both with 101 million users on Gmail.”

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