You may have read recently that The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names (Icann) have had meetings and plan to release more domain name endings from the current 22.
The first domain names expected are the ones for big corporations and Cities – with the cost believed to be around £114,000. Regulations are also thought to be fairly strict for corporations wanting to obtain their own unique domain name address.
Here at twentysix we find this news rather exciting , and have been discussing the implications both for branding and for search online.
In terms of branding we suspect only big companies will fork out for their own domain name endings as it’s such a costly business. Companies that can afford it, however, will have the huge benefit of standing out online, and bolstering their unique identity. For example a ‘.coke’ address could work wonders for Coca-Cola. Whilst this will help corporations stand out from the crowd, we wonder if it might take some time for users to get used to these new domain name endings.
Currently keyword domains help rankings in Google and other search engines. Relevancy in the domain is important, with a ‘.co.uk’ thought to work better in the Google UK index than a ‘.com.’ The implication of new domain name endings could have an effect on this, if Google finds that branded or City addresses are more relevant to certain search queries. Our thoughts are that perhaps IP based and location based searches might be effected by the presences of domain addresses ending with a City name. It might well be that once these domains are obtained in the future that Google and other search engines will find a .City domain address is a more accurate way to find results that are relevant to queries with a specific City name in it.
For the near future it seems that due to the cost and limitations of obtaining a unique domain name ending, the ‘.com’ and ‘.co.uk’ addresses will still prevail in search. However over time, when more and more new domain name endings appear, we might well see branding done differently online. We feel search engines will take the new domain names seriously, and potentially look to adapting their algorithms to these new addresses, which in many cases are going to be more relevant.
We’ll be keeping a close watch here at twentysix on how popular these new domains get. If it starts to have a significant impact online, we’ll let you know here. This could be the future of branding and search.
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