The CEO and President of Verisign James Bidzos had some pretty interesting comments regarding the new gTLD’s and the effect they may have on .com and .net registrations during its earnings call today.
I have listened to the last several Verisign earnings call and this is the first time I can remember an analyst asking a pointed question about the new gTLD’s and their effect on the .com and .net registry.
The question was asked by JP Morgan Chase & Co:
Any thought to whether the gTLD program, whether people coming in for new sites might actually be thinking about an alternative gTLD for .com? And maybe that’s having some sort of impact?
D. James Bidzos, Founder, Executive Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of Verisign:
“”As far as the new gTLD program, I don’t think that, I don’t see anybody who’s going to abandon the .com for a new gTLD.
There’s a lot of strong anecdotal evidence that, that may not be the case.
I can give you an example. So, for example, you may have seen that the U.K. paper, dailymail.co.uk, a very typical English configuration for a web address, using a company that U.K. configuration.
So dailymail.co.uk purchased dailymail.com.
They said that they purchased it because they wanted something that was more global that would allow them to get more traffic, especially in the U.S.
They paid GBP 1 million for it.
They bought it from The Charleston Daily Mail of Charleston, West Virginia, a 100-year-old Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper, who after they got their roughly $1.6 million for that domain name, were free to go out and buy whatever they wanted.
Then they chose to go out and buy CharlestonDailyMail.com.
If they bought it for retail, they probably paid about $10 for it.
So I think .com is very much the preferred, established reliable name.
I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future with the TLDs.
I’m sure some of them will do well, they’ll build some community.
But I guess I can give you one data point. If we look back, this is not the first time this has happened.
There have been some new TLDs before, and one of them that I think actually is a good idea of what success what might look like, a good example would be .co.
And I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with it.
.co is a short name, it’s just 2 letters.…
