Recent Posts
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.ooo sales targets are batshit crazy
New gTLD registry and e-commerce network Infibeam, which is taking its .ooo TLD to sunrise today, has been bandying around some truly wacky registration predictions in the Indian press today.
The company’s founder told one local paper, the The Hindu’s BusinessLine, that .ooo will have volumes that dwarf .xyz and a literally impossible number of sunrise registrations.
I’m not going to link to the article itself because the BusinessLine website, probably via an embedded ad, tried to download malware onto my machine. The headline is “Infibeam to offer ‘.ooo’ for ‘.com-savvy’ netizens” if you want to Google it.
Here’s an extract, however, which quotes Infibeam founder Vishal Mehta:
The company is targeting 35,000-40,000 trademark registered companies along with several SMEs.
“The new GTLD is the first of a kind initiative by any e-commerce company. Over the next 6-12 months we expect to get about 1-2 million domain registrations under .ooo,” Mehta told BusinessLine.
This is nuts for at least two reasons.
First, Infibeam seems to be expecting 35,000 to 40,000 sunrise registrations.
That’s impossible.
The .ooo sunrise period starts today, when there’s just shy of 33,000 trademarks listed in the Trademark Clearinghouse.
A TMCH listing is of course required to buy a name at sunrise, so even if every mark in the TMCH converted to a .ooo name — which they won’t — the TLD still couldn’t hit the bottom end of its projection.
In reality, .ooo will be lucky to hit 500 sunrise registrations, just like every other gTLD this year.
Second, the only way Infibeam is going to get one to two million registered domains in six to 12 months is if the company not only gives them away for free, but actually forces them upon registrants without their consent.
The registry with the most number of registrations to date is .xyz, which has about 517,000 domains in its zone file today. It’s managed that feat in three and a half months largely by giving the names away for free to its registrars’ customers whether they want them or not.
Conceivably, Infibeam could do the same with .ooo, but that wouldn’t be especially helpful to its application commitment to make the gTLD “synonymous with trust and consumer choice”.
Indeed, its application talks exclusively about offering .ooo names to existing Infibeam customers.
Could the company leverage its BuildaBazaar e-commerce network to create quickly a substantial base of registrations?
It web site talks of a “billion dreams” and a “billion stores” and its .ooo gTLD application states: “Our goal is nothing less than providing a billion stores for a billion people.”
According to the application, Infibeam will try to persuade its BuildaBazaar customers to upgrade to a premium package that includes a .ooo domain name for their stores.
All Infibeam would need to do would be to convert 0.1% of its billion-strong BuildaBazaar customer base to .ooo domain names and it could hit one million registrations almost overnight.
That would assume that BuildaBazaar has a billion stores, of course. It doesn’t. It has 20,000 stores.
So where are the “1-2 million domain registrations” over the “next 6-12 months” going to come from?
Beats me.
I hope for Mehta’s sake that he was misquoted because otherwise I suspect he’s going to be very disappointed very quickly.
.OOO sh*t
Here’s a scenario in which it could happen: to celebrate a minor firmware update to Apple TV, Apple give every one of their users a free .ooo domain. (Sadly, every one of the domains begins with the string “bono.”) Your new domain mysteriously appears as one of your “Favorites” in Safari.
Their BaB seo needs an overhaul, this is probably a way to implement that, don’t think they’re looking at this being an independent profit center.
Though who’s to say .ooo isn’t better than .xyz or any of the other ‘too long for mobile’ strings in the newgtlds?
A million registrations might be a bit of a reach though.
Funnily, OOO is the Russian equivalent of Ltd. I don’t know if the registry operator envisaged that kind of use, but definitely it’s could be a marketing opportunity for them.
“Общество Ограниченной Ответственностью” Would be interesting to see whether the Russians and other countries within that region would register this domain for their corporate use. The .RU ccTLD has about 5 million registrations.
Has a nice ring to it though: .ooo 🙂
There could be some confusion between alpha O and numeric 0 in voice-use because in England people often use alpha O when saying numerics. On the other hand, most suffixes are alpha. Then again there are novel suffixes arriving because of the new gTLDs and some few might imagine it was numeric. Education and use over time should decide ultimately.
Also, this new suffix helps against e-anarchy because of the ‘legal alien suffix immigration’ which seems possible in early stages or even in the future.
typo: Also, importantly this new suffix helps against………
For start-ups, this could be a good opportunity to start their ventures; look at the trends in the last couple of years. i have seen many start-ups choose funny, crazy names for their websites, and if they don’t get their desired names in .com or .net, they can always think of this new Dot Triple O domain to fulfill their dreams.
This new top-level domain .OOO is equally seo-friendly, and hence i think people would think about it. After all, every online entity is fighting for that first rank in Google and other search engines.
For big brands, they will certainly give a thought to .OOO because normally they register all generic top level domains so that other lesser known brands do not register a domain in their (big brands) names.
Price will play crucial role; if .OOO offers competitive or affrodable prices to customers, then i don’t think customers have any problem in shifting to this new top level domain.
It’s too early to pass any judgement on .OOO. Let’s wait and watch how things come up. chances are that this new TLD get success especially in India as there are lot of small and medium level enterprises coming up.
For any interested readers, the last few pro-.ooo comments all came in from the same IP address.
HAHA – I was thinking that had to be the case when I read the comments.
Felt something was fishy there but your comment confirms it. Must be some overzealous employee.
Btw if I was Vishal Mehta, I would just block all the search keywords kinda domains myself and ask companies to bid and provide the data for it. For eg. flights.ooo will be a flight search engine, hotels.ooo will be hotel search engine and so on.
About to go pear shaped with another gtld cock up?
https://www.namepros.com/threads/what-new-gtld-domains-have-you-registered.816203/page-30#post-4720827