big vs small OR where is the future of .Me
“.com is the King” – a usual sentence by people from domain name industry. It is, and it will be years from now. It’s a result of 25 years of existence in the market. It was THE FIRST and used to be THE ONLY commercial TLD for years. If you wanted to have a web site regardless of the content, the only domain name available for registration was .com. Eventually, .com became a default domain name extension for any kind of website. When people were giving out their web site address, almost anyone assumed that the extension was .com.
Remember the time when browsers were adding extensions without requiring you to type full address? First, they would try with .com and if there was no website, they would try with .net and .org. I can’t remember whether they allowed any other extension. And what was the result of such browser functionality? A new era of typo domains and instant web sites with tons of advertising began.
But, there is one more global domain name extension that is not .com, but it is still domain name of choice present in everyone’s heads. After 25 yrs of existence, .org, .com’s younger sister (or brother), became a default extension for the world organizations. I think I’m not wrong if I say: “In addition to .com, .org is the only default TLD extension, for those who need domain name for their organization”.
After 25 years things are changed. There is so much content and information online, and even more websites and services providing such content. Generally speaking, all of them can be divided into several categories (commercial, informative, organization etc.). These categories can be thought of as potential market for TLDs other than .com and .org. In my opinion, TLD can be successful only if it fits in some of these categories.
And what category does .me fall into? In terms of content it stands for any kind of personal information on the Internet. As a marketing message, it is widely used by social networks and “call-to-action” creator. We believe that this is what our future is. We are completely aware of our role and we don’t intend to fight existing extensions and try to convince people to switch to .Me domain name. Our philosophy is not to “push the giant down” but to become a TLD with content and meaning for people who need a personal web site or want to create a new service using marketing power of cool .Me domain names. If someone “from the past” wants to join us, they are more than welcome.
You can read about our results this blog. They prove that .me has future and what is more important .Me has meaning which fits into personal content category. More important, this category grows larger and larger every day. Just to give you an idea whom we are targeting and what we achieved, here are some updates:
- threewords.me, attachments.me, dress.me, kiip.me and tap.me recently launched;
- media also wrote about .Me and you can, for instance, read The New York Times articles and Sully’s blog;
- we also believe that the future of .Me is tightly connected with young people’s future, so we decided to support education by sponsoring GoDaddy scholarships and organizing WebFest.Me Conference in Montenegro.
So please, join us in our mission of creating a more personal Internet by registering your own .Me domain name and write about yourself or create a new social network or service. .Me will help you to express yourself!
