Predrag Lesic about .ME’s success
After very successful renewal period and big numbers scored at auction hosted by SEDO, Predrag Lesic, the CEO of .ME Registry decided to write a short article in which he elaborates on possible difficulties of setting up the TLD, touches on the subject of domain industry in general and explains what is the driving force behind more than 420 000 registrations of .ME domain names and their overall success. And of course, what better place to post this story than his blog PredragLesic.ME (below):
“It was mid 2007, a great year for domain name industry with the growth rate of over 30%, when we started building our plans for setting up of .me, a brand new TLD. However, a year after we faced the biggest recession in the world’s economy and its negative impact on domain name industry. Despite all these setbacks 2008 had to be THE year of .ME launch. Still, this wasn’t the only problem we had. Government of Montenegro was not very supportive – they pushed us hard to bring .me to the world scene as soon as possible. Our schedule was so tight that even allocation of domains acquired through Sunrise applications was done in Land rush or even later, in the GoLive period. The establishment of the TLD was performed in a hurry, but with great help from Afilias employees involved in this project. We managed to complete all the necessary steps from setting up registry system to DNS setup, with some energy to spare for the future challenges. As expected, the greatest challenge was not the technical, but the marketing component of TLD establishment. It is clear that successful promotion of any product requires time, and time was what we lacked. Despite all these difficulties we managed to consolidate our marketing efforts (many thanks to Go Daddy staff and Robbie Birkner who was with us at that time) engage the registrars as much as we could and reach the number of 100,000 domain names in the Registry only 7 days after public launch.
And this is how .ME brand was made…”
