[GTALUG] TLDs

[Karen Lewellen]

This is a very interesting thread.
I have a personal website, that I originally set up using my name, 
instead of  the name of my production company which  is g. a. f. 
Entertainment.  I do have the domain gafentertainment.com but it is not 
hosted anywhere.
Lewellen is welsh, and there are several different spellings.  Imagine my 
surprise   though learning there is another karen lewellen.
My own site being
www.karenlewellen.com
Meant the other person ended up creating itskarenlewellen.com instead.
Do not get me started on the gmail problems, I still get her stuff 
because when spoken I have to be careful not to answer the question 
what's your email address with its karen lewellen and so forth.
Anyway, at the other end of the spectrum for me?
When the nonprofit organization I worked for first chose a name  the idea 
was to hype the name of our flagship radio series, Curtain Up!
As we distributed Curtain Up!  our founder decided curtain up distribution 
was  a fine name..but this was before we had a web presence.
giving my work email address is quite a dance,  our site is
www.curtainupdistribution.org
ahem.
Granted our Canadian office is a little better,
www.commongroundmedia.ca
But   from a marketing and branding standpoint, we are a nonprofit 
newsroom, I have to work around the automatic assumption we do advocacy 
media, which we firmly do not do, its not really journalist integrity.
My point is that there really can be far more than vanity in a domain 
name, especially  when you want to be found, and fund raise, and so forth.

Kare



On Thu, 25 Jul 2024, Andrew Heagle via talk wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 25, 2024 at 11:20 AM Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Most "memorable" domains are an outright waste of money. Especially ones
>> that are more cute or curious than memorable.
>>
>> Plus, remember that you can't own a domain, you're just renting it. Miss
>> the rent and it goes to someone else, possibly a rival.
>>
>> In the era of first location-aware search engines and now AI-powered
>> queries (not to mention QR codes and URL shorteners), domains are simply an
>> inferior way to be found on the Internet. These days the non-vanity value
>> of most domains seems to be shrinking as they're simply less necessary. But
>> I guess the vanity factor cannot be dismissed.
>>
>> - Evan
>>
>
> There is a tld called .richardli. Its owned by Hong Kong born, Canadian
> business guy Richard Li (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Li). Yes, he
> bought a vanity TLD just for himself. I guess his email address is
> me at richardli? I believe this is the only vanity TLD made.
>
> When ICANN opened up to allow new strings, I think the cost to
> register/apply for a TLD string was $250,000 US 10 years ago, plus
> partnering with a Registrar and other things.
>
>
> Andrew
>