… in my opinion, the answer is closer to “no” than to “yes” and I will try to explain why. It’s easy to place all of the burden on registries and assume they have to buy their way towards end user awareness (billboards, TV ads, radio ads, online advertising of course and so on)… realistically speaking, that’s not going to happen. Why? Simply because they’d have to throw ridiculous amounts of money to obtain even a ridiculously small fraction of the results that dot com for example obtains effortlessly.

Why?

Ask yourself what your favorite websites are.

Maybe Facebook.

Perhaps Google.

Gmail? YouTube? Amazon? Twitter? EBay? LinkedIn? Bing? Yahoo?

What do all of them have in common?

The Dot Com extension. Every time someone types in Facebook Dot Com, Google Dot Com and so on, they are de facto reinforcing the Dot Com brand. Every time someone talks about Facebook, Google and so on, the same thing happens. Every time a company promotes its Dot Com website, the Dot Com extension is also being advertised. Dot Com receives ridiculous amounts of exposure without Verisign having to pay one red cent.

Asking new gTLD registries to compete with that via paid advertising is unfair.

Again, it’s just not going to happen.

In my opinion, meaningful and sustainable end user awareness can only be generated once websites built on a certain extension become popular.

Let’s assume Video.IO (random example) is launched today and within x months, ends up surpassing YouTube. This is the type of exposure that can generate meaningful end user awareness for the Dot IO extension. One such event can have a bigger impact than the advertising efforts of all registries combined. Unfortunately for registries, it’s something they have little control over. Sure, they can for example give some of their best domains to developers, startups and so on but it’s largely hit or miss. A classic example of an uphill battle.

People didn’t choose Dot Com because it sounds well. They chose Dot Com… well, just because. What matters here is the word “chose” is in the past tense. It already happened. That ship has sailed and the current situation is what it is.

Dot Web for example sounds better than Dot Com but it will never even come close to surpassing it because Dot Com was there first and now, it receives 100% free exposure for the reasons I’ve referred to thus far. Today’s conclusion should therefore be obvious: no matter how hard registries work, it’s an uphill battle to put it mildly.