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.pink and two other gTLDs get contracts
Kevin Murphy,
October 3, 2013, 10:50:29 (UTC),
Domain Registries
ICANN has signed Registry Agreements this week with three new gTLD applicants, covering the strings .wed, .ruhr and .pink.
I would characterize these strings as a generic, a geographic and a post-generic.
regiodot GmbH wants to use .ruhr as a geographic for the Ruhr region of western Germany while Atgron wants to providing marrying couples with .wed for their wedding-related web sites.
Afilias’ .pink belongs to that unusual category of applied-for gTLDs that I’m becoming increasingly interested in: the non-SEO generic.
The vast majority of generic, open gTLDs that have been applied for (mostly by domainer-driven portfolio applicants) in the current round are essentially “keyword” strings — stuff that’s very likely going to prove useful in search engine optimization.
I’m talking here about stuff like .music, .video, .football and .porn. These may prove popular with small business web site owners and domainers.
But there’s another category of generic gTLDs I believe have little SEO value but offer a certain quirky-cool branding opportunity that may prove attractive to regular, non-commercial registrants.
I’d put strings such as .ninja, .bom, .wow, .hot, .love and .pink into this category.
I’m very curious to see how these kinds of strings fare over the next few years, as I suspect we may see many more such applications in future gTLD rounds.
Thanks so much for all of the info so far