Entries tagged with “marketing” from Domains / Internet Technology News - DNS News

DotCo, which is the ccTLD for Colombia, is opening up to general public registration today.
According to official sources from both Neustar and CoInternet the registry has handled over 90 thousand registrations in the first 15 minutes!

You can expect the various domain / internet news sites to carry more updates on the volume of registrations over the next 24 hours and beyond.

While the initial registration phase of any new domain extension can attract a lot of media interest and a flood of registrations you need to look at the "big picture".

In a few months time when the initial excitement has died down how many new registrations per day will there be?

More importantly, how many of the domains initially registered will be in active use? And by active use, I mean not "parked" or simply redirecting to an existing site?

The key players in CoInternet's pre-launch marketing have a lot of experience in the domain name industry, so it was not that surprising to see how much hype they were able to generate in advance.

But will that translate into active usage?

I certainly hope so, as many people have invested heavily in the new extension, but I would be worried, as always, that a disproportionate number of names might end up under the control of domain professionals.

It's too early to tell obviously, so in the meantime let's wish them all the best of luck with the launch - it looks like it's going very well so far!

GoDaddy's adverts wouldn't be considered that risque to a European audience. However, for some odd reason, they've caused plenty of controversy in the US for the last few years.

This year they're obviously capitalising on the run up to the SuperBowl with trailers for their adverts.

While Hollywood loves to whet our appetites with trailers for full length movies, GoDaddy has taken the step of creating teasers of their ads!

Here's the trailer:

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has upheld a number of complaints brought against Domain Registry of America (DROA).

In a recent ruling the UK regulator's decision includes responses from DROA and is worth reading.

The complaint centred around three complaints:

Three recipients believed the mailing was misleading because it appeared to be a bill requiring payment and implied they had transferred a domain name registration when they had not.

No surprise there.

Their reply, however,  should raise a few eyebrows:

Domain Renewal Group (DRG) said their mailing was intended to notify recipients that their domain name was about to expire and, because of deregulation in the Domain Name industry, consumers had a choice of registrars with whom to renew or register a domain name.  They said their mailing did not claim that the recipient's domain name had been transferred to DRG or that payment was due without agreeing to move to their company.  They believed this was clear from the claims "Domain name holders are not obligated to renew their domain name with their current Registrar or with the Domain Renewal Group", "Review our prices and decide for yourself.  You are under no obligation to pay the amounts stated below, unless you accept this offer" and "This notice is not a bill, it is rather an easy means of payment should you decide to switch your domain name registration to the Domain Renewal Group".

The ASA didn't believe their explanation:

The ASA noted the mailing was headed "Domain Name Expiration Notice" and closely resembled a bill, including a credit card payment slip, and considered recipients were likely to infer that their domain name had been transferred to DRG and a renewal payment was now required.  We noted the mailing stated "This notice is not a bill ...", "You are under no obligation to pay the amounts stated below ..." and "... now is the time to transfer and renew your name from your current Registrar to the Domain renewal Group ...", but did not consider it was sufficient to remove the overall impression that the mailing was a genuine bill requiring payment.  We concluded that the mailing was misleading for falsely implying that recipients had already transferred their domain name to DRG and for not making sufficiently clear that it was a marketing communication

What does this mean for DROA?

Unfortunately very little, as the ASA does not have a huge amount of power, nor does its counterpart in any other country, at least not to my knowledge.

At various times throughout the year websites end up getting adorned with various "bling" to celebrate holidays of various kinds.

Enom have tweaked their header image slightly in advance of US Thanksgiving:



Have any others?

AFNIC's latest online and TV campaign to promote .fr may not be the most amusing thing you'll ever see, but it's still amusing to a point.

Here's the long version of their advert:



In French - sorry ! Subtitles available!

I know I'm a bit late to the game with this one, but here's the Telnic promo video with the alternate ending:

I don't check the RegisterFly website that often, so I've no idea when they "rebranded"

The most obvious difference is subtle:

has become:
Not that big a difference admittedly, but still you'd have to ask what they're playing at.

Back when RegisterFly was still RegisterFly the emails they sent out were a lot less dodgy as they included tangible contact details in the email footer AND on the website.

Now, in the latter half of 2008, all you get is a link to the website and if there are proper contact details there I had issues locating them this morning.

But what drives them to do this minor rebrand?

If they wanted to shake off the old name then why not do it cleanly?

Ours is not to reason why I guess ....

Bret has done it again.

His blog posts may not be the longest, but boy are they incisive!

In one of his most recent posts he mentions a marketing mail he got from Network Solutions promoting business blogging. Nothing amazing there. But Network Solutions don't seem to have a blog, or if they do it's well hidden!

Simple test - try and find a blog on the Network Solutions site. I couldn't find anything either on the main page or the sitemap. Maybe it's hidden?

In some ways the failure of .eu to capture hearts and minds makes me sad. I'm European. I'd like to think that a European namespace could be a success, but that seems to be a misplaced desire.

As I mentioned some time ago, the only way to grow a namespace or TLD is through usage. Once people start to see a domain extension in "action" then they begin to start using it. If people start using it then everyone benefits - registry, registrars, "normal" registrants and domain investors alike.

When was the last time you saw a high profile .eu site?

You'd have to think long and hard about it, wouldn't you?

Even the "big boys" aren't really using their .eu domains actively.

Google.eu doesn't have any A records ie. it doesn't point anywhere.

Yahoo.eu points to a Yahoo site, but not to the European one!

Ebay.eu actually does what you'd expect it to do, but it was the only one I could find when I did a quick search this evening.

Why do I bring this up?

Last week John McCormack sent me some preliminary statistics on domain usage for the EU namespace and the figures were quite worrying. He's since published a blog piece with a breakdown of the stats and if I were in Eurid I'd be sobbing.

You can read John's article, but the basic underlying truth is hard to avoid.

Adoption of .eu has been pretty bad and that's being diplomatic about it.

While there may be a large number of domains registered only a very small fraction are in active use, with many simply redirecting to a ccTLD equivalent or being parked.

Launching a new TLD is not easy.

Afilias have resorted over the past couple of years to literally giving away domains for free and it looks like Eurid are adopting a similar approach.

DotMobi, however, have worked hard to build up interest in their TLD among users of all shapes and sizes and got the investors interested as well.

What will the future hold for .eu?

Will their PR pay off or will it all fizzle out?