Auto Dealer Monthly Magazine is the daily operations publication serving the retail automotive industry. This automotive publication serves dealer principals, officers and general managers with the latest best practices.
Issue link: http://autodealermonthly.epubxp.com/i/84037
dealership operations / technology Battles Loom Ahead for Automotive Domain Names George Nenni is the vice president of operations for Dominion Dealer Solutions. Nenni began his automotive career with Dealer Specialties in 1993. He was the Director of Operations for Dealer Specialties when Dominion acquired the business in late 1999 and became the Vice President and General Manager in 2001, first at Dealer Specialties and then at Dominion Dealer Solutions. GNenni@AutoDealerMonthly.com D id you think the dust had settled on website domain names? Sure, there were cyberspace-grabs from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, but much of that seems to be over. Every once in a while, we hear of a new dot- something extension being added, but nothing earth-shattering. Well, the rules of the domain name game have changed. Whether your dealership has one or mul- tiple websites, you currently have one of 22 Top-Level Domains (TLDs). I'm refer- ring to the .com, .net, .cc and so on. This past June, the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) began allowing a large number of new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) and offered the applications for them. If a company was awarded one or more of these gTLDs, that company could begin to sell website URLs with the related extensions. For instance, General Motors Co. could secure .chevy and create websites with this extension. However, applying for these new gTLDs was very expensive, with an up-front application fee of $185,000. If you were lucky enough to be chosen, there was an additional annual fee of $25,000. There was also a limit of one company per unique gTLD. On June 13, 2012, ICANN made the list of gTLDs public on newgtlds.icann.org. I downloaded this list and began to analyze it. It was extremely interesting to review. Bids were made for some potentially great domains. I thought that .app, .inc, .law, and .web were all possible winners. Wal- mart went for .george. (Of course, I sent them a note asking for early registration of nenni.george very cool.) As expected, some of the heavy hitters in digital marketing applied for quite a few domains. Among the leading applicants, of course, were Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. (9 percent of applica- tions), but another new startup called Donuts Inc. has also emerged. Donuts, well-funded by $100 million in venture capital, came out of nowhere to bid for some lucrative gTLDs with a staggering 16 percent of all 1,931 applications. Through this analysis, I pulled out all of the automotive-related gTLDs (listed below), which accounted for 3.5 percent of the overall list. In the automotive industry, there was plenty of activity, but companies seldom went for large purchases. The orig- inal equipment manufacturers (OEMs), naturally, bought their brands, presumably to begin requiring dealers to move to OEM-approved websites with the custom extension. OEMs will look back on this and see it was a very smart strategic move, especially with names like Audi, Ford and BMW that create a three- or four-charac- ter extension while still securing the brand. The most surprising realization in review- ing this data was the few automotive OEMs that did not secure their top-level domain—Acura, Mazda Motor Corp., Mercedes-Benz, Rolls-Royce Motors, Scion and Subaru all failed to be a part of this potentially lucrative domain grab. Time will tell how important this becomes, but as I looked at the number of major global players that took part in this, it appears well positioned to become very big business in the future. Domain aaa audi auto auto auto auto Applicant American Automobile Association Inc. Audi AG Big Maple LLC Dot Auto LLC Fegistry LLC Uniregistry Corp. autoinsurance Allstate Fire and Casualty Insurance Co. DERAutos LLC autos bentley bmw 44 Bentley Motors Ltd. Bayerische Motoren Werke AG