Kudos To The Verisign dotTV Team
I just wanted to publicly say thank you to the product management and marketing team from Verisign for reaching out to discuss public and domain investor perception of the .TV extension and asking for feedback as they move .TV forward.
In too many ways there is a huge disconnect between the people that control domain names in general and those of us that make a living either by selling them or developing them, or in my case both. Whether you believe in "alternative" extensions such as .TV is not the point here, the point is they were open minded enough to ask my opinion as both a domainer and an end user.
I admit freely that my investment in .TV names is minimal these days but do think it is probably one of the most underutilized branding tools out there. I do see many successful sites using it but not as many as there should be. Recently I had been contemplating a few specific .TV acquisitions for development purposes so this call was very timely and gives me a bit of confidence in making the acquisitions.
They were very open-minded to both critical and positive discussion and my overall impression is they are truly interested in taking it to the next level. The biggest breath of fresh air was really the fact there was no defensiveness when I brought out negative items (premium pricing) and other things I have heard from .TV investors over the years.
Thanks to Samantha Frida, Thomas Correia, and Michaela Barnes for spending the hour or so yesterday talking with me.
Bruce, one of the problems is engrained user behavior. I cover campaigns in my blogs and as a result of using a domain as a headline get indexed at the top of the searches for that domain, sending type-ins to the search bar to my blog where I can analyze user habits and patterns. Often if the names is say Ted.TV, someone will type tedtv.com.
I met with them last year at there offices to discuss the issues of the premiums and the high renewals per year. I had lunch with Richard Rosenblatt and told him the same thing.
I been investing in .tv since 2000 and own many such as Spain.tv, Actor.tv, Europe.tv, Moscow.tv, Religion.tv, Georgia.tv, etc. Therefore, I have a big interested in making this succeed.
The key to .tv is get rid the the high premiums and charge on the front end, whatever that might be. Many premiums are expiring everyday that were $500 renewal and get repriced at $10,000 premium. That is robbery and they just sit and don’t sell. Bad business sense, bad PR, and things need to be changed.
Thanks, Jim
@Owen – You are correct, as much as I have had success developing non-.COMs I did, just for protection, register Missourime.com. Interesting you tracking it that way, very good way to analyze.
@Jim – You are correct, that is something I brought up and you are VERY spot on there.
.tv will have to overcome the same problem every tld has, that is diminishing the dominance of .com. Obviously the .tv has high marketability as a video source domain but there is nothing that can be done on .tv that can’t be done on .com, making .tv almost irrelevant because of the dominance of .com.
Any video content that could be marketed and put online on a .tv can also be done on .com and therefore the obstacle of overcoming .com becomes impossible until the general internet using public starts to acknowledge non .com extensions in their daily internet use. See the demise of .mobi, it’s irrelevant now that mobile webs don’t need the extension.
The best hope for .tv is that it becomes more relevant than .net or .org and that will happen only with businesses marketing and advertising .tv sites. That I can envision because it is short and memorable.
@Rob – You just gave the same talk I did to them yesterday, that is the exact way I described it. The premium registration fees kept a lot of the solid brandable highly searched names from ever getting out so the brand was hurt from the beginning. My two cents was until there is a way to push the development of solid .TV names and get past the stigma of video sites being hard (high cost) to deploy then it will be hard to get .TV more recognized.
BTW, i tried to email you your beta info for EzDevelop and your email kept getting rejected, can you contact me again.
Bruce,
Any idea what changes (if any) they are planning to push .tv to the next level?
It is nice to hear that they are watching & planning ways to keep the extension growing.
Ronnie
I do not have specifics but I plan on having a follow up to go into next steps and will post the details here. Stay tuned:)
Ok, cheers Bruce.
With all the developed .tv’s that have appeared over past few yrs (seems to be much more use in europe, going by what us based friends say) then I’m very positive on .tv’s future but for it to become more tempting for domainers or domain investors then maybe some changes would need to take place.
I’ll look forward to reading anything more you have to say on my favourite extension.
R
good post bruce and cant wait until you do another post on this topic with more specifics or how they respond to you.
im in .tv for the long haul and im happy on what i have..