The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)(templetons.com) |
The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)(templetons.com) |
You can slap a joehardware.com on the back of your van, or a local TLD, and people will know that it's the address of your website. Now do the same with joehardware.builders, people have no glue as to what that might be. It doesn't even help to write www.joehardware.builders, that somehow more confusing.
No, the issue with the new/generic/vanity TLDs is that they've lost all meaning. They lack context.
I disagree. No one was born recognizing .com domains, and outside of the US non-.com domains are already quite mundane. In fact, FANGs like Amazon employ cc TLDs quite extensively to segregate marketplaces, and they do just fine.
> No, the issue with the new/generic/vanity TLDs is that they've lost all meaning.
This assertion has no bearing in reality, specially given domains like .io, .icu, .info, .site, and even .aws.
These domains are also worthless. I can say I would find something like alicehome.services a lot more memorable.
And with advertising, it's more about continuous exposure. So I see the alicehome.services car around town for the third time and say, "oh there's that weird domain again".
Your marketing team will charge ahead with migrating all your product.business.com sites to just product.business
You'll get half a year into that migration before someone asks about shared domain cookies. Oh, login.business.com dropped an SSO cookie on business.com?
After that you'll get the lovely request - you work with the browser people, can't we just edit the standard to drop a cookie on a TLD?
I would really like a better solution; but that appears to live solidly within a successor to current HTML pages, something designed from inception with security contexts in mind. Maybe they can fix login / logout / credential management too; I really hope they just use kerberos.
The prophecy didn't come true. Granted the big boys got their .googles and .amazons, but good old .coms are still a thing and not considered "cheaper".
The real problem is can I still type weirdfilename.exe into the browser bar and get to a search engine?
and even if it was available to register, they can reserve words for their own usage before launching it
and if you mean, someone else actually doing the paperwork to get the .bing tld for them, it wouldnt ever be approved.
The answer is clear, if you want to stay in the past, then go with .com, but the .future is in vanity TLDs. For more information, check out my website https://ok.boomer and considering buying a .boomer domain today!
Probably because they're often used for spam? (I bought em because they were cheap.)
Additionally, I always found it interesting how the .xxx TLD never took off (was essentially DOA), even after they were so popular and valueable in the pre-sale auctions icann and others conducted b4 their introduction/release several years ago.
One of the original TLDs is .arpa, and I don't see any of that uniformity in a world where second-level domains like .co.uk domains are pervasive.
> Additionally, I always found it interesting how the .xxx TLD never took off (was essentially DOA)
The usecase driving .xxx was not from site operators but from third-parties seeking an easier way to censor porn sites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.xxx
The concept was flawed from the start given the same site can be served through multiple domains, and it relied on site operators located in any jurisdiction from any corner of the world to voluntarily serve their sites thorough that TLD.
Heck, let Big Tech take .google/.apple/.amazon/.comcast etc if that's what it takes to get this done. Point being to keep the root pollution to a finite amount rather than the ongoing sell off of any name imaginable.
I doubt this assertion is grounded in reality. Sites that resort to puns from cc TLDs like lobste.rs don't suffer from name recognition problems, and no one ever had any problem remembering twitch.tv.
Not really, anymore. Android permits you to take a picture of a QR code and use it's URI later by going to the saved picture and clicking "Lens" (which activates Google's ML to identify QR codes).
But why would I want to learn some god awful system when I could tell her what I want in a sentence and let her do the data entry for me?
Granted, the domain name system is not ideal, but adding new TLDs, however long, is a better solution than dealing with having to name your company so you can get a .com that matches it.
And honestly we need better mechanics for machine-intended references regardless. It's ridiculous that you resolve and load a webpage, only for that webpage to require you to resolve a bunch more human readable (ie non-decentralized) names for loading subresources. For example, going to a bookmarked page shouldn't result in any DNS queries for human readable names.
And why should that distinction be made? "New gTLDs" have been active since 2013. That's nearly 10 years of usage you're still arguing should be invalidated.
To be clear I'm not picking on things like .biz etc. Even though those were obvious cash grabs, they're at least widely applicable and thus widely adopted. But things like .christmastrees .business .companyname .morebiglongwords etc. Over "nearly 10 years of usage" I can still count on my fingers the number of times I've seen things like this used.
The longest vanity TLD I could find was .travelersinsurance. Two dozen characters are nothing more than a rounding error in the 2k character limit. You routinely pass 10 times more characters in path and query parameters than you do in the domain name.
Also, how often do people type in URLs instead of clicking links?
Also, keep in mind that some browsers are starting to hide path and query parameters in the address bar and instead only show the domain name. I presume that makes domain names and TLDs more relevant in terms of name recognition.
> The Google Chrome browser supports a maximum length of a web page URL of 2 MB (2048 characters) in size.
taken from [0]. Do note that this is a restriction created by the browser developers. In theory a URL can be of arbitrary length. Some browsers (like Firefox) do comply with this, though they might now show the full URL to the user, cutting it off after a certain number of characters.
[0]: https://mywebshosting.com/what-is-the-maximum-url-length-lim...
For example, the following domain renders just fine, despite being ~2076 characters long: https://postman-echo.com/get?foo1=aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
See the upstream chromium docs: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...
I don't think adding ~10 or so characters to the TLD meaningfully impacts this limit.