EVEN MORE DOMAINS

Nominet is contacting .co.uk owners to remind them of their rights to register the .uk version of their domain. Uptake of the new domain has fallen short of expectations, with only a handful of companies moving over to use .uk for their marketing. Having said that, it’s important to protect your brand and that is why our July blog article recommended you register your .uk before the free-for-all in 2019.

400+ choice

Over the past year, a stream of new domains has been released to the market. Amongst the most popular are .club, .guru and .photography, as well as .berlin and .london. There are many descriptive domains being launched - .agency, .gallery and .repair - with many more on the way.

Promoted as the alternative to .com, without any business connotation, .xyz is also receiving a lot of press. Yes, it has had more registrations than all the others, but those numbers have been inflated by free registrations. That has gained .xyz a lot of publicity, not all positive. Trying to bolster legitimate sales, you’ll now find you can register a .xyz for just 99p – a tenth of the price of a .uk. At that price, many people are choosing to register for the short term, to see if it can live up to the hype.

Cybersquatting

With many of the new domains registered to individuals, rather than companies, there are concerns about brand hi-jacking. Take macdonalds.xyz and calvinklein.xyz as examples. You won't find a website at that address but the owners are hoping a decent offer will be made one day.

The expansion of domain names is an opportunity to grab a keyword domain. It's not expensive to register a .xyz domain but it has become costly to protect all domains for your brand. Give us a call to check the domains associated with your name or trademark.