The New Dot-Biz TLD compared to Dot-Com
Would a rose.com by any other Top-Level-Domain (TLD) smell as
sweet? Some entrepreneurs seem to think so. They're betting that
they can profit by investing in the new dot-biz extensions set
to go live this October. Once again, single generic words like
"business" or "home" will be up for grabs for use in domains
like business.biz or home.biz thanks to recent moves by Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the
organisation in charge of managing the Internet's TLDs.
While dot-biz is not the only new TLD soon to be available, it
is the one most likely to challenge dot-com for a share of the
domain market for businesses and the one first expected to go
live - making it the new TLD of choice for some. But how
valuable dot-biz names will end up being remains to be seen.
Though the dot-biz TLD can clearly play a niche role as a less
expensive alternative to dot-com, the dot-com extension has
several advantages over the dot-biz TLD. First and foremost, the
Internet grew up with the dot-com suffix and that three-letter
extension has been firmly imprinted into the minds of every
Internet user. This helps to explain why other General-TLDs like
dot-net, and dot-org are not as popular or profitable as their
dot-com counterpart.
Additionally, it seems likely that the biggest Internet players
such as Amazon.com will buy up their dot-biz extension and
merely redirect traffic to their dot-com site. Most of these
companies have trademark rights to the name already and are
allowed to apply for them before the general public.
This means two things: first, many very lucrative names will not
be available for entrepreneurs to buy, and second that companies
will not invest very much money to market their dot-biz
extensions. Consequently the dot-com extension will not receive
anywhere near the amount of marketing attention that went into
promoting the dot-com TLD (don't expect the Super Bowl in 2002
to be for dot-biz what it was for dot-com in 1999!). Without
this push, the dot-biz extension will probably remain in the
background.
So it looks like the dot-com TLD will likely be the market
leader for the foreseeable future. But while many of "the best"
dot-com names are already registered, many are not being used. A
recent study shows that as much as half of the registered domain
names are not in use. The domain market will therefore center
around trading names with the dot-com extension that have
already been registered on markets like Sedo.co.uk, or
Greatdomains.com. Here buyers and sellers of already- registered
names can connect with one another to utilize their valuable
dot-com domains.
But while the dot-biz extension will not eclipse dot-com, it
definitely will have an important secondary role as a cheaper
and more accessible alternative to dot-com. Just don't think
that business.biz to fetch the $7.5 million that its dot-com
predecessor did anytime soon.