Fancy Purchasing A Personalised Domain? Well Now You Can

Good news, if you’ve always dreamed of dropping the rather uniform .com or restrictive .co.uk, you can now create your own domain. ICANN officially confirmed that it would now be creating unique names for those businesses with the desire and $185,000 to do so.

That’s right, if you want to have your own .domain then you better have a fair amount of money set aside to make your dream come true. The premium cost is likely to deter all but the biggest corporations; however, the impact on the Internet is huge, creating one of the biggest shakeups in well over a decade.

Essentially, it could theoretically lead to an infinite number of domains being created. Brand management would certainly become far more focussed too, with businesses able to protect and develop their name online. For instance, I may now want to buy up www.Ben.Norman and have a nice simple, memorable domain. However, for me and many small to medium sized company, this simply isn’t viable.

So why has this been introduced? Well, it has been mooted for some time now and it was finally put forward as a suggestion earlier this year, with ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) taking the lead in managing the process.

It’s unlikely to free up any existing domains though. Why, for instance, would O2 want to abandon its existing URLs to adopt a single .O2 domain? Part of brand management is to ensure that you have as much protection as possible, preferably with every combination of destinations all own and controlled by you.

Some might simply question whether this is just a money making scheme by ICANN or an ego trip by the big online businesses. After all, what is wrong with a .com domain really? As mentioned, it’s unlikely that a major corporation is going to risk not owning all available domains, so what advantage does a personalised gTLD (Generic Top Level Domain)  actually offer?

So don’t expect a massive surge in popularity any time soon. However, you should start to see a few appear after January 12th next year. What impact this will have on rankings etc. certainly remains to be seen, but following the brand update you would imagine that Google will be keeping a close eye on developments.