How are .music and .xxx transforming the entertainment industry?

With a new era in Internet policy looming, Digital Hollywood Spring welcomed Ben Crawford, CEO of CentralNic and dotBrand Solutions, as a panelist during last week’s conference at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey, California.

The panel, Internet Video and Advertising Strategies: Relationships between Content, Advertisers and Technology, addressed the new generic top-level domain (gTLD) policy that will be implemented by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in the coming months. In addition to impacting the entertainment business with domain extensions like .music and .xxx, this ruling is poised to introduce new opportunities, and questions, about brand representation and protection online.

As the only representative of the domain name industry, Ben Crawford joined Don Kennedy (Senior VP of Network Sales, AOL’s Advertising.com), Graham Sharp (CEO, Xtranormal), Maryse Thomas (CEO, POKEWARE), Brent Horowitz (VP of Business Development, FreeWheel), Dean Donaldson (Global Director of Media Innovation, MediaMind) and Keith Nissen (Principal Analyst, In-Stat, Moderator). Crawford highlighted the unique monetization opportunities that new top-level domains will present for rights-holders in allowing them to clearly distinguish to consumers and search engines a branded universe of authentic, official content, free from piracy—helping to reclaim the traffic and expenditure currently being diverted to unofficial and criminal websites.

As CEO of domain name industry innovator CentralNic and its recently established dotBrand Solutions, Crawford enables online marketers, brands and entrepreneurs to acquire and control the most valuable real estate on the Internet: top-level domains. Following an early career working in licensing and marketing with the major motion picture studios and global cable channels, Crawford played an integral role in the earlier phases of online adoption, particularly in the sectors of sports, gambling and art. In 1996, he negotiated one of the first deals to create content for Microsoft’s then-new MSN; from 1998-2000, he was the executive producer of IBM’s official site for the Sydney Olympic Games, drawing in 11.3 billion hits in two weeks to set a record for the highest website traffic of the twentieth century; subsequently, Crawford went on to lead several media businesses, including SportBusiness Group, Louise Blouin Media and MutualArt.com, before being named CEO at CentralNic in 2009.

About dotBrand Solutions
An end-to-end service from global domain name registry CentralNic, dotBrand Solutions (www.dotbrandoslutions.com) serves companies and individuals to achieve tangible success in the new gTLD market. dotBrand Solutions guides brands through the financial, operational, and technical requirements for top-level domains, which includes equipping them with intelligence on best practice and innovation, in addition to serving as a turnkey outsource solution to handle technical execution.