The original author: Kevin Murphy

The ICANN working group tasked with creating policies for the next round of new gTLDs is wrapping up its work this week, setting up the battle lines for the next phase of the program’s development.

Members of the cross-constituency Subsequent Procedures for new gTLDs group, known as SubPro, have until a minute before midnight UTC Friday night to declare whether they’re not happy with any parts of the 373-page document (pdf).

It’s expected that some groups and individuals will have beef with some of the SubPro recommendations, which will be included in the Final Report as dissenting minority statements before it is sent off to the GNSO Council later this month.

The report, the product of five years of discussions, will largely affirm that the next new gTLD round will proceed along roughly the same lines as the 2012 round, with some of ICANN staff’s historical ad-libs being codified and a few new big concepts introduced.

New additions include the idea of a pre-evaluation process for registry service providers, enabling applicants to pick from a menu of pre-approved back-ends and avoid the cost of having their technical prowess evaluated for every string they apply for.

The price of applying could be kept artificially high, however, to discourage gTLD stockpiling, and the report will also recommend banning the coexistence of single/plural variants of the same word.

One area where there was definitely no consensus was the issue of “closed generics” — a non-brand string reserved for the sole use of the registry — it’s going to be up to the GNSO Council and ICANN to muddle through this one.

While the consensus call marks the end of the working group phase of new gTLD policy development, there are still many substantial hurdles to leap before the next application round opens.

In the last round, the policy was approved by the GNSO Council in 2007, and ICANN didn’t start accepting applications until the start of 2012.

it may not take five years between policy and launch this time, if only because many of the new recommendations are merely affirmations of the status quo, but there are new mechanisms ICANN will have to implement before the next round opens, and we should probably expect more than one comment period on iterations of the next Applicant Guidebook.

The road between now and the next round is still likely measured in years.

The original author: Tony Kirsch

Here’s a consistent story from our clients that’s becoming commonplace as we travel the world sharing the .brand story.

A new person comes into domain management. They’re technically astute, but find themselves managing a large portfolio of domains, sometimes tens of thousands of names. There is a sense that this is more of a historical benefit to the business than a current one – especially with the clear data indicating that the vast majority of them are not receiving noticeable volumes of traffic.

Nonetheless, the portfolio is maintained in order to mitigate risky domain non-renewal, helping to keep the IP professionals comfortable, and avoiding BEC scams to clients/customers.

A large amount of time and money is spent in managing these domains, and despite the efforts of the domain management team to advocate their strategy and business purpose, they are constantly digging up websites that have been created by some well-intentioned individuals who weren’t aware of the internal domain registration policies. The process to acquire these domains and put them onto the companies centralized domain platform has to be done – but it’s never as easy as it should be and finds the domain manager generally spending hours chasing employee owners.

One such client at a global advisory firm, who has asked to remain anonymous, recalls their first reactions to finding out that their company had their own .brand TLD.

“I saw the immediate value of the .brand in terms of running our business unit and cutting costs. From the domain management perspective, we’re always being asked to create domains for areas across our global business – and increasingly, these are not available and force us into expensive campaigns to purchase domains. Having our .brand allowed us to create the domains that we wanted, in real time, without fear of availability or expensive purchase prices.”

This is a common experience that we hear from our clients. Often what starts as a key reason to use their .brand turns into a range of downstream benefits that were previously not apparent.

Similar client experiences reveal a pivotal moment where the downstream benefits changed things substantially.

A global financial services client shared such a moment for their firm.

“As we experimented with our .brand, we found that its capability was so much deeper than we had expected. We completed a couple of test cases with our .brand which created a significant amount of internal interest. We took the opportunity to collaborate with Marketing to define the ‘perfect end state’ for our Brand utilizing our .brand.  The elimination of one off domains, and the defensive portfolio, for limited campaigns reduced our domain portfolio costs and significantly increased global Brand awareness.  It also provided an easier way to track campaign effectiveness”

Not only did we increase the awareness of the Brand Management function through our usage of .brand, we also created significantly less subdomains on our main .com site. We see this as a significant advantage for managing and securing the site as we have over 1000 subdomains off our main site today.

In the past, managing all the subdomains on our .com Zone File was significantly more complicated and very difficult to track. In reality, this was fundamentally riskier for the organization due to constant changes to our core Zone File and we were regularly finding traffic going to the wrong place as promotions or products died off but were not updated within the main site’s Zone File.

With our new focus on using our .brand, management and ownership of the domains are easier to track and when a promotion is over, we can simply remove the domain or forward the traffic to the main .com page.  This reduced the risk of domains being used for fraudulent purposes.

With our .brand, we manage it completely and no-one can access the TLD, or take over a domain which we feel will create much less confusion long term – especially when these historical subdomains were allocated to third parties.

The original URL: https://www.makeway.world/latest-news/real-world-brand-insights-from-a-brand-management-professional/ 

The information reproduced in this website is not for commercial purposes, only for learning and exchange.Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

The original author: Tony Kirsch

The original author: ANDREW ALLEMANN

Some helpful tips for making the keep/delete decision.

I like to spend the final week of the year preparing for the next. This includes reviewing the domains in my portfolio that expire over the next 6-7 months and renewing the ones I want to keep. I ran this exercise last week and documented my process in the hope that it’s helpful to readers.

I currently have about 1,700 domains, which means about 150 are up for renewal in a given month. It takes time to review 6 months’ worth of expiring domains to make decisions, but it’s time well spent.

Here are some resources I use to determine which domains to keep/delete and my thought process.

Afternic leads: If you have a lot of domains at Afternic, they probably get quite a few leads that you never hear about. The buyers don’t end up being qualified, or their offer is nowhere near your floor price. But knowing that a domain receives offers is important when making keep/drop decisions. You probably don’t want to drop a domain that receives real offers, even if they are only $500. Ask your Afternic account manager for a leads report for your portfolio.

Parking revenue: Parking isn’t what it used to be, but the data is still relevant. Some domains (even new top level domains) can still earn their keep from parking alone.

dotDB: dotDB lets you quickly see how many extensions a domain is registered in, as well as how many other domains the keyword appears in. Search for your second level domain to find out how popular it is in domain names. A paid version will show you if the domains resolve to websites.

Estibot: Knock it all you want, but Estibot is a great tool for figuring out if you’re overlooking a valuable aspect of your domains.

After reviewing all of this data, I ask these questions:

1. Will this domain ever sell for a lot of money? Or is the pool of buyers (or their financial wherewithal) too small to make a difference?

2. Was the domain previously registered in a lot of extensions but the owner(s) let them expire? Perhaps I thought there was a lot of demand for the second level domain, but it was really one person who let all of the alternatives expired.

3. Is the singular/plural version of this domain available for hand registration? If so, the domain might not be worth much.

4. Did I reduce the price substantially last year and it still didn’t sell? If it was priced below $500 and didn’t sell, it’s probably time to cut it.

5. Does this domain have a big/important/valuable subject matter, but it wouldn’t ever make sense for a company to use this domain for a website? The two aren’t always correlated.

6. Have I sold domains that are similar to this one? Some domainers invest in ‘themes.’ If none of my domains within that theme have sold, the market is telling you something. Likewise, have I received inquiries/leads on any of the similar domains?

7. How long ago was this domain registered? If it was a long time ago, resist the urge to think about sunk costs. Why hasn’t it sold?

I ended up turning off auto-renew on about 80 domain names, so roughly 10% of the domains due to renew in the next 6 months. This is more than usual. But I figure the cost of renewing domains is only going up, and perhaps I should have cut some of these domains years ago.

The original URL: https://domainnamewire.com/2021/01/04/how-i-decide-which-domains-to-renew-vs-delete/

The information reproduced in this website is not for commercial purposes, only for learning and exchange.Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.