“How New gTLDs Are Playing a Role in Black Friday & Holiday Marketing in 2014”

The gTLD strategy blog published an article on how “How New gTLDs Are Playing a Role in Black Friday Marketing and Holiday Marketing in 2014”.

It has some interesting stats on what companies have registered and are using .BLACKFRIDAY and .CHRISTMAS New gTLD domain names.

Here are a few highlights:

Uniregistry’s new gTLD has seen mild registration numbers so far (11,069), but for top retailers, protecting their trademarks in this string, along with Uniregistry’s .CHRISTMAS (13,380 registrations to date) could provide some holiday peace of mind.

To check how the top 100 online retailers, as ranked by Internet Retailer, have adopted these new strings, FairWinds checked their brand names in both .BLACKFRIDAY and .CHRISTMAS and found some interesting results.

Of the publication’s top 100 retailers:

• Only 17 have registered their brand names in .BLACKFRIDAY, and only 14 have registered their brand names in .CHRISTMAS.
• 9 of the 17 brands who have registered in .BLACKFRIDAY and .CHRISTMAS are among Internet Retailer’s top 20 online retailers
• 8 and 4 brands that rank between 21-100 on the Internet Retailer list have registered in .BLACKFRIDAY and .CHRISTMAS, respectively

Luckily for brands, very few third parties have registered these names either, and the pages that are registered (JCPenney.BLACKFRIDAY or Gilt.CHRISTMAS) either resolve to parked pages or don’t resolve at all.

And they use Amazon to point as to what the best marketing technique is:

If brands want an example of how to utilize these registrations, they should look right to the top of the list: Amazon, the reigning king of online retail, is the only brand to have its .BLACKFRIDAY and .CHRISTMAS registrations redirect to seasonal content.