Verisign: Brands Are Keeping Their .Com: Don’t See Anybody Abandoning .Com for .Brand or Another TLD.”

by

In the Verisign earnings call yesterday the following question was asked by Fred Ziegel, Topeka Capital Markets. Fred Ziegel (Analyst – Topeka Capital Markets):

“In your .brand customer base that you are working with, what’s your sense of how they are thinking about it from the perspective of — are they going to move from .com to .xyz or whatever? Or are they more thinking that this will be an incremental domain?
Here is the answer from Pat Kane of Verisign
“So not all of our brand customers have determined exactly how they are going to use their top-level domains. But we would imagine that some would complement their current .com with their own offering.”

But we don’t see them abandoning their .com.”

Jim Bidzos (Executive Chairman, President and CEO): Added:

“And just to clarify — for example, if we were to employ .verisign, we would never abandon verisign.com.

Like most brands, we’ve invested heavily in promoting it. And everybody is familiar with it,  we would probably redirect traffic from one to the other; we would never abandon it.

Of the .brands that have applied, many of them are our back-end registry customers.

So they are not only keeping their .com, but they are also moving their .brand onto our platform to make sure that it runs on the same reliable 18 years of 100% availability infrastructure that we operate.

At this point I think the traffic for anybody in .com is so valuable that I don’t see anybody abandoning their .com for either .brand or for another TLD.”

 

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. janedoe says

    An established brand is unlikely to abandon their .com

    But a brand that can achieve significant name recognition by doing just that will.

    For most, the new gtlds are likely to supplement existing st rather than replace.

  2. Bobby says

    Of course they’re not going to “abandon” the .com. Abandon is a harsh term in the context of the discussion. But there’s no denying the “official” value in the .brand, otherwise they would never have ponied up for it in the first place.

    Case in point, the recent Bloomberg incident.

    “And everybody is familiar with it, we would probably redirect traffic from one to the other; we would never abandon it.”

    As I see it, it will be a one-way redirection from the .com to the .brand. Again, otherwise what’s the use.

  5. Jeremy says

    “I don’t see anybody abandoning their .com for either .brand or for another TLD.”

    What about the sixth largest bank in the world, Barclays? Try going to Barclays.com and see what happens.