Name Ninja, a Toronto-based startup formed this week by former Tucows and MacLaren MRM exec Bill Sweetman, will join a small number of global consulting boutiques that help businesses with domain-name branding.
Sweetman said he saw a business opportunity with the release of almost 2,000 new generic Top-Level Domains (or gTLDs) that are set to flood the internet as early as this fall.
“There are going to be hundreds of new websites with .green, .cat, .eco, .app, whatever. There’s going to be hundred of millions of dollars spent on marketing them,” said Sweetman, who’s worked with clients on domain-name strategies throughout his career. “It’s going to be a tidal wave of consumer confusion and business confusion.”
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Sweetman’s career path was founded in the digital sphere at Electric Eye Multimedia in 1992. He subsequently worked at Delvinia and then at MacLaren MRM as vice-president of internet strategy, leaving MacLaren in 2007 to join internet services company Tucows.
He said that advertisers need a coherent domain-name strategy in place so they can take advantage of the new gTLDs to promote – and protect – their brands. A movie production studio, for example, will need to think about acquiring “.movie” addresses for its films. Even if the studio doesn’t plan to use those domains, it may be worth buying them to prevent other companies from doing so.
Sweetman said the company will also work behind the scenes to help clients acquire domain names that aren’t publicly available through private auctions.
As many as 1,930 new domain names will be released by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), among them popular generic terms like .store, .inc and .blog and .art. ICANN received name applications from organizations across 60 countries, many of which were from domain-name registrars and webhosts who plan to sell web addresses. For example, Canadian nonprofit PointQuebec registered .quebec, which means they can sell (or give away) web addresses like travel.quebec or aerospace.quebec.
A fifth of the names will be for company and brand names, like .apple, .walmart, .cadillac and .ford. Amazon and Google were among the most greedy applicants, seeking 76 and 101 names respectively, which brand names plus dozens of generics like .book, .home and .dog.
However, a lot of popular brands made no attempt to grab their names. There won’t be a .pepsi, .coke, .disney, or .ikea. Sweetman said some brands may have already invested so much in advertising their webpages at .com or .ca domains that changing to a new address just wouldn’t be worth it.
Companies with valuable brands like these shouldn’t be too worried, Sweetman said, because some trademark protections exist to prevent someone else from using your intellectual property in a web address. But businesses “should at least understand what’s at stake here,” he said. “Know what your options are and consider them, as opposed to being asleep at the wheel.”
“It’s not a negative, but it’s a big change,” he said.
