Boom! .XYZ Launches – Could It Be The Next .COM?

What a day. .XYZ launched today and the buzz is going strong. Daniel Negari, .XYZ’s founder wrote one of the best blog posts I’ve read by a domain industry veteran to-date.

dotXYZ

Before I dive-into .XYZ, I want to talk about the domain industry perception of these new TLDs. To do this I’d like to go back in time and look at the .CO launch. When .CO launched I remember so many people saying, “It will never take-off”, “They’ll lose too much traffic to .COM” or “Nobody is going to use it!”

.CO hit the 1M registration mark at the end of year one, a feat that took .COM fifteen years to hit. Here’s the thing, the reason for .CO’s success isn’t because the two letters “C” and “O” together just seem inherently valuable to people. Instead it all came down to the team behind the TLD that made it all possible.

What I think .CO proved to the world is that you can take a new gTLD that nobody has ever heard of, and with a great team and great marketing you can sell 1M domains in a year. I don’t think many new gTLDs will hit this mark because I don’t think they have the team to do it.

Enter .XYZ, a company with a team that I see having the same magically synergy that allowed .CO to hit the million registration mark, and that’s exactly what Daniels goal is, and to do this he’s going big.

Daniel Negari

Four years ago, I had a dream of creating the .xyz domain extension. Although the letters “XYZ” have little-to-no meaning, everyone in the world has used and seen “XYZ” at some point in their lives. So what is .xyz? .xyz is whatever you want it to be. It’s a totally customizable domain extension for Every Website, Everywhere.™ It’s the platform for people all over the world to develop a memorable and meaningful online presence, regardless of their industry or interests. (Daniel Negari, founder .XYZ)Domain industry veterans like Andrew Rosner have already publicly announced their investment in .XYZ:

andrew-rosner-bio-image

I personally like the pure generic nature of .XYZ and the fact that it comes with no pretense and no expectation. I personally don’t see it having high commercial value, meaning it won’t likely be adopted by IBM or General Motors, but I do believe that it will be popular with the young generation and will be very fitting for anything which is social, pop-culture, trendy, edgy & culture related – particularly among the 15 years – 30 years old demographic.We have not been investing much, if anything, into new gTLDs but we did make an investment into .XYZ names and I’m confident it will pay off. (Andrew Rosner, founder Media Options)

Like most things in life, the proof is in the numbers so for anyone who says it can’t be done, just remember, it can be done, and has been done within the last five years. Do I think most people could pull it off? Absolutely not. However I’ll tell you this, Daniel, Mike and Shayan are not normal people, these are the best-of-the-best, and that is what it takes to make something this big happen!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton