OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
While Fiba, the International Basketball Federation, is busy promoting the official and quite long official website of the world cup, www.fiba.com/spain2014, another domain name is dominant in the games: Spain.info.
The Basketball World Cup in entering the semifinal phase today with USA going against Lithuania. Unfortunately, for some, Spain lost to France yesterday and will not have the opportunity to compete against the USA that hasn’t lost a game since loosing to Greece back in 2006.
Spain.info is the official Spanish tourism website sponsored by TURESPAÑA the Spanish national tourism organization and is heavily promoted for many years now. Advertising Spain.info in an international sports event like the Basketball World Cup is great for boosting Spanish tourism. I wish Greece did something similar.
ICANN and Afilias, the .info registry, have an agreement for country names to be reserved by ICANN under resolution 01.92 but these domains can be allocated to the respective countries. Any national agency can contact Afilias and acquire the respective country domain name. A lot of countries don’t know this. e.g. USA.info and Greece.info are still reserved after 13 years after .info was launched.
All 2 letter country code domain names and country names are reserved by ICANN in all New gTLDs. This makes country domains in existing gTLDs, like greece.biz, very rare and valuable. Countries that don’t own their name in any of the gTLDs should take this opportunity and register the .info. It’s only $10.
.Info domain names are a perfect match for tourism/travel websites and I think that Afilias should start contacting all countries that have not registered their respective domain name yet.
Watch some Greece – Argentina 79 -71 (yes we lost to Serbia but won the game below) highlights here to watch the Spain.info ad in the game:
Just from that ad I’d say they are using the wrong domain entirely, should be using VisitSpain.com.
“All 2 letter country code domain names and country names are reserved by ICANN in all New gTLDs. This makes country domains in existing gTLDs, like greece.biz, very rare and valuable.”
Not sure I follow this. We would someone pay a lot for greece.biz on the basis of 2 letter new tld names being reserved? Is this your name?
Why VisitSpain.com and not Spain.com? Because the have the word “visit” in front?
BTW I own VisitSpain.info.
I didn’t just say that 2 letter new gtld domains are reserved. I said that 2 letter domains AND country names are reserved.
So if you want completeness the second sentence should have been:
“This makes 2 letter domains and country domains in existing gTLDs, like gr.biz and greece.biz, very rare and valuable.”
Of course it’s my name! 🙂 I am surprised you asked… lol
The message they are sending is just two words, “Visit Spain”, so how does spain.info makes sense?The message isn’t quite right and the tld is confusing/obscure.
Spain.com would be logical, but I’m guessing they don’t want pay a large sum for it. Visit****.com are great domains in my view. Probably the second best choice after spain.com, especially since the marketing is telling people to do just that. Lots of tourist bodies use them, e.g. I typed london and the tourism office is using visitlondon.com.
Regarding the talk about greece.biz, I can imagine you are naturally in favour of this, but because something is “rare” does not make it more valuable. Something might be valuable if it is rare AND if there is strong demand for it. i.e. the computer game that everyone wants but was only made in limited numbers, the Ferrari that everyone had a poster of, but only 100 still exist. That is two factors combined though, not simply rarity. A snowflake is rare.
Greece.biz is worth what it is worth. People will want it because it is greece.biz, not because greece.pronto can’t be bought. It isn’t worth more based on new tlds.
A lot of times the slogan is different than the domain. I don’t know why you find this strange.
If the message was simply “Spain” a lot of people would think that they were just writing the name of the country the games are in.
.Info is confusing and obscure? I can’t even imagine what you think of all the New gTLDs… lol
We have to disagree on this. Country domains are both rare and valuable. I am not saying that Greece.biz is as valuable as Greece.com but if you want a “Greece” domain name you don’t have a lot of options. And I believe that it’s value went up with New gTLDs exactly as
all 2 letter domains went up and all other reserved names by ICANN went up as well in existing gTLDs.
I am not saying that Greece.biz is as valuable as Greece.com but if you want a “Greece” domain name you don’t have a lot of options.
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There is lot of options. Much like there was lot of options before new tlds came out. Type in “greece” or “visit greece” into Google and there are no tlds. No .info’s, .biz’s, .co’s or .club’s. It is all .com and .gr, travelgreece.com, greeka.com, http://ftp.gr, travel2greece.com etc.
People don’t think,
“I must name this site Greece, with one word, with any extension on the end”.
Companies will get the best .com or .gr from the tens of thousand of possible combinations they could choose from. They choose extension first, then they find the best keywords they can get.
Those choosing a less than common extension is a rarity, so to resell a name you need firstly someone interested in using the new tld AND willing pay a premium for it. That is why there is hardly any sales of any new or alternate tld.
In the 15 of so years since .biz came out it has had a half a dozen reported sales over 15k, most of them were 1 character domains (4 out of the 6). Even the very best .biz’s are barely worth 10k (terms like casinos, sport, email).
Yes of course there are people like this:
“I must name this site Greece, with one word, with any extension on the end”.
I can see them every day.
.biz is established and one of 4-5 gTLD extensions were you can get a country domain.
Maybe it is the worst of the 5 but still…
I can google “greece biz” or “greece .biz” and immediately get tens of potential buyers that already use a xxxxxgreece.biz domain and might want an upgrade.
BTW I am constantly selling “alternative” tlds. Just last week I sold a .info for $3,500 and a .us for $2,000.
Sure, 5 figures are not common in .biz but I will take a 4 figure .biz sale any day of the week. Not for greece.biz though… 🙂