CircleID

Gee, I guess we should feel encouraged that .TRAVEL has the same problems as other sTLDs.

It seems to me that .MOBI has some chance of success, since they have a somewhat captive audience in all the mobile phone users.  (Imagine what the takeup would be if a few large mobile carriers tried foo.mobi before foo.com when a user just types foo.)

I can also see some value in certification for types of organizations where people care a lot about real vs. fake ones, e.g., .BANK.  I doubt that protecting us from fake travel agencies is enough to make a go of .TRAVEL.

Other than that, what's the point of an sTLD?  I don't know, and in view of the impressive failure of all sTLDs to date, neither does anyone else.

When I hear people opine about "success" or "failure", I remind myself that they are talking solely with respect to their own expectations.

Regarding the new tld's, there are a lot of people with unrealistic expectations.  TLD's not meeting their expectations are deemed "failures".

These declarations are premature at best.

Many factors contribute to this: the internet bubble, the inflated forecasts contained in the ICANN dog-and-pony show, comparisons to the inertia evident in .com, the oldest and dominant TLD.

Seasoned entreprenuers and venture capitalists realize that it can take up to 10 years for a new industry and a new business to gain critical mass.

Course corrections are inevitable, as they are in any industry.  The winners in this space will be those who are patient in building their brand and focus on adding differentiated value to their customers.

Regards,

Tom Barrett
EnCirca, Inc

Aha! Failure is not an option because ... we'll define whatever happens to be success! Why didn't I think of that?

The sTLDs from the previous round are all failures not just because they all missed their most pessimistic size targets by 95% but because they have no mindshare and are not getting any.  If you look at .EDU, which is in effect an sTLD, it's not huge but it's successful because people know about it and, generally speaking, anyone who's eligible for .EDU uses it.  Do co-ops use .COOP?  Museums use .MUSEUM? Airlines and airports use .AERO?  Nope. Even outfits who do have an sTLD registration rarely use it, e.g., I asked my wife what her credit union's URL was, alternatives.org or alternatives.coop, and she said .org because that's what's all over their web site, even though both domains work.

It's true that .TRAVEL has a less bad marketing plan than prior sTLDs, and Tralliance and registrars, particularly Encirca, have apparently signed up over 10K registrants already.  (I can't verify that, since .TRAVEL has so far ignored my applications for the zone file access that their ICANN contract requires.) But spot checks show a whole lot of parked pages, so I see no reason to think that .TRAVEL will get any more mindshare than .AERO, no matter how far back you move the goalposts.

John,

I think you just proved my point. 

.edu and .org domains were first registered in 1985.  They are twenty-one years old.

.coop and .museum are just infants in comparison.

Calling them failures by comparing them to 21-year olds is way too easy and premature.

regards,

Tom Barrett
EnCirca, Inc

I have nothing against sTLDs, being one of the tiny band of suckers who actually uses a .AERO domain, but I can't see arguments that domains will become successful merely by becoming older as anything other than wishful thinking on the part of people who hope to make money from them.

It didn't take 20 years for .EDU to get mindshare, it tool about 20 minutes.  If the trajectory of, say, .COOP were anything like that of .EDU, every co-op on the net would be using .COOP now, and I wouldn't be seeing .COOP domains being abandoned by my DNS customers.

In my previous comment I noted that my wife thought of her credit union as a .org rather than .coop, but what's really more important is what she said before that, which that she didn't really remember, because she always finds it by typing its name into a search engine. Domains don't matter unless they provide something more than just a name.  Maybe people will flock to .TRAVEL so they can be sure they're buying tickets from a real airline rather than one that only has cardboard airplanes, but I'm not holding my breath.

What sort of suckers does that guy expect to pay $49 for a four-page text file, when you can read a lot more, and more varied, commentary on new TLDs online for free?

The recent report and this discussion raise many valid points about sTLD's in general and .COOP specifically.

My retail coop in the UK bought the main .COOP registrar in late 2004 in order to make a better go of it than the previous owner. It's true to say that .COOP is nowhere close to achieving the founders' original targets but the vision remains sound, if perhaps a little before its time as far as the international coop community is concerned.

We believe the key to the success of .COOP is a Registry and a Registrar(s) that are part of that community and have a clear insight into the customer value proposition. Our acquisition of the business from a private UK company has already made a big difference to the first point.

John's wifes's comment on using .COOP for her Credit Union shows how much work needs to be done on the second point. But for others of us - what you could describe as the more innovative coop businesses - it's a real no-brainer and we switched to .COOP straight away. We were already promoting our coop identity to customers, members, staff and suppliers as part of our commercial strategies offline so this was a natural extension. The key for us now is to find the thousands of coops around the world that we're sure think the same way that we do!

One of the great things about this sTLD is that using it for web and email addresses always gives us the opportunity when giving it out to people to answer the question ".COOP? What's that then?" with a message that reinforces our difference.

Looking at my bottom line, I only hope we don't have to wait 21 years for our vision to come true though!