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Opposing views on .poker domain names are getting some traction on the blog today.
With the recent creation of over 1900 new gTLD (generic top level domains), one of the new domains included in this batch is the .poker domain. Of all 1900 domains, this is one of a few that is creating the most buzz.
The way the new domains are handled is a bit complex. When new domains are announced, companies bid for the rights to “hold” the domains. This means that the company that purchases the gTLD .poker will have final control over who can purchase a domain that ends in .poker.
A company could choose to hold the domain strictly for its own use, or it could choose to sell individual domains with the .poker prefix—ie ABCCompany.poker.
What are your thoughts? Is this fair for the company that gets the bid or should everyone get a shot to buy the domains they want?
The final result is, that the new “named” domains will be more and more expensive and laywers have enough work.
Look at the past. The prices of some “unnamed” sold domains was really high:
Insure.com | 2009 | $16.000.000
Sex.com | 2010 | $13.000.000
Fund.com | ? | $10.000.000
Diamond.com | ? | $7.500.000
Israel.com | ? | $5.800.000
Casino.com | 2003 | $5.500.000
Toys.com | 2009 | $5.100.000
Candy.com | ? | $3.000.000
Pizza.com | 2008 | $2.800.000
Poker.org | 2010 | $1.000.000Leopold
I don’t think that these new TLDs are worth anywhere near the amount of money you have to pay to obtain one. Every internet user recognizes .com as being a premium domain and has search engines in their mindset when they’re looking for something so I can’t see people typing in “.poker” to a browser hoping that they find what they’re looking for. If they do, the impact will be on whether Google (or the other default search providers that come up in people’s browers) rank these domains above the traditional TLDs for exact matches. I doubt that they will, so purchasing one seems to be more a vanity exercise to me than being a sound business decision… who wants to type in “buy.amazon” rather than “amazon.com”? It just doesn’t feel natural. The only exceptions to that would be some of the cool brand-able campaigns you could do around a domain like “play.poker”
Would be interesting to see what the impact is if, for example, Pokerstars buys .poker, and sets up “party.poker” as a domain and redirects it to Pokerstars. Would love to see how much traffic that got naturally over time.
