Our MarkMonitor team recently conducted its first installment of ‘office hours’: a series of interactive, Q&A focused webinars highlighting the most pressing topics in domain management today.
The MarkMonitor™ office hours series, following a university office hours model, provide MarkMonitor customers the ability to ask questions on a variety of domain-related topics with real-time answers from MarkMonitor in-house experts and industry colleagues. To encourage candor, questions are anonymized and the sessions are not recorded. All the more reason to attend live!
June 2020 office hours: .Brand generic top-level domains (gTLDs)
Our office hours session on June 24 focused on .brand generic top-level domains (gTLDs), the challenges and benefits of .brand TLDs and use cases and best practices. For this session, we were joined by two expert customer panelists who were kind enough to share their .brand experiences and expert insights, including fielding many questions from a lively and engaging Q&A. While we do not record these sessions, we would like to share a couple of valuable takeaways.
- Using a .brand domain is beneficial in building consumer trust. A .brand domain guarantees that the brand name is always in the body of the URL, so for companies with a portfolio of online products, there’s no risk of consumer confusion around which brand a specific product belongs to.
- During the global COVID-19 pandemic, many companies must establish secure channels for working remotely. Our clients provided two clever examples of resourceful uses of .brand TLDs as creative solutions to problems that many companies face today. First, panelists suggested using a simple .brand domain name like “vpn.company” for a company’s virtual private network (VPN), which would allow remote employees to connect to their corporate network as securely as if they were physically in the office. Second, in response to the challenges of onboarding new employees remotely, they noted that a trusted domain like “newhire.company” could provide a secure onboarding experience.
- A final takeaway we discussed is the unlimited availability of .brand domains, given the exclusive use the .brand owner has in its TLD. This newly available online real estate can help pare down domain portfolios that have become bloated with unnecessary legacy TLDs. A related benefit of unlimited availability is that brands don’t have to make costly acquisitions of other domains that could impede on their brand online. For example, if a company is launching a new product called “newbrand” and newbrand.com is taken, the company can instead launch its new product at “newbrand.company,” potentially saving thousands of dollars on domain acquisition costs.
While it’s still relatively early days for .brand gTLDs, an open and collegial community of advocates is growing, suggesting that the use of this innovative new gTLD is set to increase. MarkMonitor is a proud member and an active supporter of the Brand Registry Group (BRG), for example, which enables best practice sharing and advocacy on behalf of .brand TLDs.
We are very thankful to our clients for being so generous with their time and expertise, and for their willingness to engage in further conversations with attendees after the session.
As registrar for many of the most visited domain names on the internet, MarkMonitor tracks industry developments to help customers make the best decisions. For a copy of the prepared background slides from this session or to get in touch to discuss .brand TLDs, please contact us here. Please register here to join any of the upcoming webinars in the MarkMonitor office hours series.
