Stock site SeekingAlpha.com just published a blog post entitled New gTLD’s Pose No Threat To Verisign.
Verisign (VRSN) is the registry for the .com and .net registry
The author of the post is stock analyst Zeus Kerravala, is the founder and principal analyst with ZK Research. Prior to ZK Research, Zeus Kerravala spent 10 years as an analyst at Yankee Group.
Here is part of his post which should brighten the new year for all .com investors:
“”I’ve seen a number of news stories over the past few months that speculate that .com registrations are on the decline and the industry will see a shift away from the traditional “.com” to both country code registrations such as .ca (Canada), .uk (United Kingdom) and .cn (China) as well as a number of new generic top level domain names (gTLDs). ”
“The new gTLDs are currently in the process of being handed out and we should expect to see anywhere from 300-1000 new gTLDs each year for the next few years.”
“If the above is true, then that would certainly be a negative trend for VeriSign (VRSN), the company that handles 100% of the .com and .net registrations.”
“The bear case on VeriSign is that the addition of the new gTLDs each year combined with the perceived scarcity of .com’s means new registrations may move away from .com to one of the new gTLDs such as .travel, .web or .car. Alternatively a company may choose to register its own gTLD such as truck.chevy and car.chevy for their different products.”
“However, I believe that the alternative top-level domain names will augment the web strategy of companies, not replace the interest in .com. ”
“The fact is that almost all organizations want a .com web address to legitimize their business. ”
“While it’s true that all of the short .com domain names have been taken up, there are plenty of opportunities for companies to use longer names with a little creativity. ”
“One strategy a company could take is to find a valid URL and then name the company based on that.
“As a small business owner, I wanted to have my own .com so I tried various other domain names before I settled on ZKResearch.com.”
“The domain name was actually part of my thought process when I started the company up.”
Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe that the new gTLDs will attract companies and we’ll see things like “mikes.pizza” or “chevy.cars” but I also think these organizations will invest in traditional .com domain names.…