We're doing great, say dot-London chiefs ... Unfortunately, few agree

Re: Golden Goosed

I can remember when BBC.com was a different place to BBC.com.

Happy daze.

Re: Figure out the pricing...

"For the club, it's 19 Euro/year. For my horse's name.... 2,000 Euro/year! Wha...?! Can't find what the criteria are."

Worse - I started looking at the cost of different London 'villages'. The prices varied widely. Upset to find nice chic sydenham.london was cheaper than neighbouring upstarts south circular ridden foresthill.london. but then if you take your lead from Foxtons ...

You do feel cheated when the ransom demanded is too low ;-)

Re: more top-level domains

Remember Boris is backing this ransomware ...

Re: I just don't get these new TLD's

. . . ask yourselves what benefits the investment will make to your customers?

If you have to ask, you may as well get one. Or you could just say no . . . and still not ask. That's probably easier.

Benefits? It makes a handy way to filter customers based on their typing skills. I can imagine telling customers over the phone "just go to salesdepot-dot-Antidisestablishmentarianism" Seriously, the only way to "get these new TSL's" is to imagine a room full of marketing guys just buzzing with fantastic new ideas.

Re: I just don't get these new TLD's

"I don't see how consumers/interested parties will get to your site by guessing."

You don't. That's what google/bing/et al is for. Guessing didn't even work back in the old days when there were so few domains you may have tried to guess.

"I understand it allows resellers to make money from the gullible, but if you are considering one of these domains, ask yourselves what benefits the investment will make to your customers?"

Nothing. If they're using Google to look for you, they just click the link. If it's a Q-Code, they don't click a damn thing. If it's written in a magazine, they just repeat it. With the market flooded with .com domains, it'll get past the 'curious' stage really quickly.

My point is, stapling a huge price tag on something (especially when the customer doesn't see any of that) means nothing - it does the same job as all the garden variety TLDs.

Re: I just don't get these new TLD's

The days of someone owning the .com and wildly guessing that to be so are long gone. You google them, nowadays. I remember when novatech.com was actually a military supplier whereas novatech.co.uk was the company that sells computer stuff. After the third time you do that, you no longer assume and you Google or remember the domain.

Hell, people don't even know how to type in addresses any more, they just google them - I'm not joking. People will Google "GMail" and then click the link they know works.

Domains are dead. Certainly owning the .com for a brand is not guaranteed by a long shot. And the home idiots are googling what they want, rather than typing in the address anyway.

In that climate, there's absolutely no need whatsoever for a domain name besides vanity. Let's call these what they are - vanity domains. And bought by the same people that want to own B1TCH as a number plate.

I can't remember the last time I actually bothered to type in an address that wasn't written down exactly (e.g. in an advert), or well-known to me. Nobody takes a stab at .com addresses "just in case". That's a perfect way to end up on a scam site.

Re: Doomed

My Mum was firmly of the 'type it into google' variety. I'd be trying to explain something over the phone and I'd tell her to open a browser and type in X and she'd say "do you mean google". Drove me nuts. She stuck with it like glue even when I'd shown her the difference a hundred times. It didn't stop there sadly; chewing broken glass would be more fun than suggesting she 'go to the desktop'.

Weird thing was she was known within her (large) company as the go to person if you were having trouble getting a photocopier or laser printer to behave, she just had this weird knack for them. She was also a dab hand with Quark and Photoshop. Just bizarre really...