As far as your .travel example. its all about the numbers. As most people are aware, people did not flock the .travel TLD specifically because it was so generic. Custom TLDs would not have that drawback.

Google may have specifically chosen not to let the .travel TLD affect weighting of results since it would have skewed existing results. They could decide to do the same to the new TLD’s as well if they chose.

As far as the Google results for .travel, keep in mind that if you search for hotel within the .travel TLD, Google has indexed just about1,110,000 pages. But if you search for hotel within the .com TLD there are over half a BILLION (547,000,000) pages so the .travel results in normal travel searches are like a needle in a haystack.

Does the extension really make a big impact to your google rankings? Take .TRAVEL again as an example. Enter ‘travel’ into google. I didn’t see a .TRAVEL site in the first 3 pages. (I like most users of google tend not to search deeper than 3 pages.)

Perhaps it is more important to consider the direct navigation habits of internet users. According to WebSideStory (2004) 67% of internet users arrive at a website via direct search. (More recent studies have suggested this might be higher!)

Do internet users search for URLs with extensions other than .com or their local country code extension? I am not sure they do because marketing departments tend not to invest in advertising new TLDs. Perhaps they know that it is very difficult to change established consumer behavior.

Try this search – go to http://www.google.com and enter just NYC hotel and notice the order of the search results as it relates to the actual URL’s of the pages returned.

If Hilton or any other chain had the URL of http://www.BrandName.hotel it would have ranked higher than any of the hotels returned do now. As you can see its the travel aggregate sites like http://www.nyc.com/hotels and http://www.aboutnewyorkhotels.com that take top placement. I think ANY hotel chain would at least want to look into acquiring such a potent SEO tool for the same reason CocaCola wants to maintain its #1 spot for http://www.coca-cola.com on http://www.google.com/search?q=coke.

The launch processes used in recent history have all differed. .EU was a first come first served approach meaning that investing in technology and multiple accreditations to make applications improved your chances of securing a domain whereas .ASIA involved an auction process. At the end of the day for generic terms such as .HOTEL regardless of whether you have a prior right or not the entity willing to invest the most will have the most chance of securing the domain or extension (in this case).

I would ask the question that once you own .HOTEL then what?

Would a hotel chain actually want to own this? or would a registry wish to sell second level domains under the .HOTEL extension?

I believe hotel chains have already invested in advertising and marketing their .com or country code URL’s and in a similar way to .TRAVEL might invest to defend their brand but not to promote their brand.

From a registries perspective has .TRAVEL (or .mobi or .eu etc) really been a success and benefit to the internet? Do we see them marketed and advertised?

New TLDs will only be valuable if users are directly navigating to them and this will happen with marketing changing our habits.

I’m not at all worried about established brands and multinational corporations that have already done the legal and marketing legwork to establish their trademarks and copyrights on there names.

Nobody is going to contest PepsiCo’s rights to .pepsi or .tostitos or .doritos. The problem I see will be with something like .hotel – who should own that? Will it end up being a first come first serve thing and Marriot or Hilton being able to beat out Holiday Inn or a privately owned single hotel that wants it?

The opening up of new TLDs represents less of a revenue opportunity (since most major corporations have already invested over many years in directing their customers to a particular URL) then it does a risk to their brands (the potential for a growth in infringement and thus the requirement of additional budgets which either proactively defending or reactively taking action).

Ultimately the degree to which this announcement actually changes the internet will depend on the implementation rules/guidelines and pricing. ICANN is projecting that the application process for new TLDs will not begin until sometime in Q2 of 2009 so we have a while to discuss!

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