I’ve said it on more than one occasion here on DomainingTips: new gTLD registries have a lot to learn from what happened with Dot Co, as it basically represents a perfect case study of marketing done right in the domain space.

At the beginning of the craze with new extensions, the first thing that surprised me was the unwillingness of registries to spend money on advertising to domain investors. They basically did the exact opposite of what .co did a few years ago. I’d call this a huge marketing fail: you have the perfect success story right in front of you and do the exact opposite. Needless to say, new GTLDs had poor results by any stretch of the imagination.

More recently, it seems they came to their senses and are actively advertising on sites visited by domain investors. After all, let’s face it: end-user aren’t exactly flocking towards these new extensions, so domain investors represent their core market.

What we also need to do however is learn from what .co did wrong. Have you noticed any .co advertisements on domain investing-related sites recently, for example? Probably not because there aren’t any. Dot Co stopped advertising aggressively and as expected, their results took a nosedive. What this means is that if the advertising efforts of a registry operator aren’t sustained, results will plummet.

This is actually marketing 101 and any serious company should know it but based on what new extensions have been doing, it seems they’ve been reading different marketing textbooks. This just goes to show you that for the most part, registry operators don’t have their act together. They thought people would come in hordes, busting their doors, eagerly awaiting their precious new extensions. In reality, most people just don’t care.

Would the situation have been different if new registry operators would have been as aggressive as a as .co was right from day one? I have no way of telling whether or not things would have been fundamentally different because market conditions are different. There was only one .co, whereas are there a lots and lots and lots of new extensions. What I am however extremely confident in is the fact that their results would’ve been much better. At the end of the day though, they probably unwillingly ended up helping domain investors. Think about it: how many investors do you know who did very well investing in .co domains? I for one don’t know anyone and I consider myself reasonably well-connected in the domain space. Quite frankly, by not being aggressive when advertising to domain investors, they ended up helping people save money that they would have probably wasted on new extensions.

This may seem harsh but if you stop and think about it for a moment, my interpretation describes reality with reasonable accuracy.

By thinking that hype surrounding new extensions would be generated without a proper marketing campaign, registries committed one of the biggest mistakes in the advertising world: neglecting the marketing dimension. This is what happens when too much occurs all of a sudden. Too many extensions, expectations that are too high, and teams behind most registries that just aren’t experienced enough to make the right decisions. The result has been a marketing fail of epic proportion but as explained throughout this article, the average domain investor should be grateful.

I’m not saying that it’s impossible to make money with these extensions, I’m simply saying that at this point in time, the risk to reward ratio does not look good for the average domain investor. Maybe this will change as time passes but right now, most domain investors, especially beginners, should be grateful for the fact that the marketing departments of new gTLD registries screwed up royally 🙂