Clickz.com, , just published an interview with Jon Nevett one of the founders of Donuts and Mason Cole their VP of Communications and I found a few very interesting quotes.
Jon Nevett is quoted as saying “At a high level the existing name space is overused and worn out. As new businesses start up, they can’t find what they want in the existing name space so they end up with a crazy mix of consonants and vowels because that’s all that’s available in dot com. So they end up with newyork35avepizza.com instead of newyork.pizza or newyork35.pizza.
Small businesses like plumbers or contractors don’t need to be in a domain with the millions of pizza shops, they need to be in the .PLUMBING or .CONTRACTING domain that makes sense for their businesses.”
Mason Cole is quoted as saying, “When we started this process, we looked at dot com as a downtown with one primary department store where everyone had their businesses. ”
“We decided that rather than just build one store with new gTLDs, we’d build an entire shopping mall.”
Cole described the digital shopping mall as one with anchor tenants and then many boutiques.
“The boutiques might not be successful on their own, but because of the economies of scale we have, they can be successful and provide people more options and choices. We applied for more than 300 and will be able to go deeper in the market as a result of our scalability and really compete with dot com,” he added.
“We will be engaged in consumer marketing and awareness of the new gTLDs focused on the benefits to small- to mid-sized businesses as well as the really big brands,” said Nevett. “We have a sales and marketing team in Los Angeles that is very active working on consumer awareness, but businesses and consumers will still need to go to a registrar like GoDaddy or 1and1 to buy the domains. While the lion’s share of domains will likely be for businesses, many of the top level domains are tailored to individuals looking to differentiate themselves such as .BLOG, .FASHION, .STYLE, .RUN, .SPORTS, .PHOTOS or even .GRIPE.
When asked about search, both Cole and Nevett agreed the gTLD program will have an impact on search.
“The top level domain will be a good indicator of what that site is about or related to and Google has announced they will factor in the top level domain name into the algorithm.…
