The sunrise period for the brand new .XXX Top Level Domain (TLD) started on September 7th, which means that anyone with a registered trademark or another right to a name can register their names before registrations open for the public. But as always when a new TLD is launched the question is, who needs it?
In most cases the good old .COM domain is sufficient for most of us, but since it’s the most popular TLD in the world it can be hard to find good names. The downside with these new and unknown TLDs is that they are just new and unknown to the general audience. Most “average joes” out there will never have heard about the new .XXX, and some of them have problems even understanding why you need a .COM at the end of the page you want to surf to.
Another downside with this launch is that it’s highly niched to a niche which some companies don’t want to be affiliated with: the porn industry! When for example .INFO was launched a couple of years ago that TLD could actually be used by most companies and private persons with the need for an informational site (like manuals or documentation for their products etc), but this TLD can’t be used like that. Or do you really thing Google or Yahoo will launch a porn search engine at www.google.xxx or www.yahoo.xxx? Or will you find porn movies at www.youtube.xxx? I don’t think so.
Google, Yahoo and Youtube (owned by Google) will probably have to register their domains under .XXX to protect their trademarks from “name-nappers”.
According to the .XXX registry this TLD will allow people to know what content they will see on the page based on just the TLD, but at the moment there are thousands of porn sites at other TLDs and I don’t think they will move to .XXX just because it’s launched. Will we in the future also find porn sites under any other TLD like before, so the filtering purpose of this TLD isn’t going to work at all 🙁
If you as a small business owner are going to protect your trademark or blog name under another TLD then your main domain, then I would suggest the .CO domain instead. Simply because .CO is a miss-spelling of .COM and if you have the .COM too you could get some visitors that otherwise would have spelled your domain name wrong and not found your site. In other words you could get some type-in traffic from your own .COM domain name by registering a .CO domain 😉 At eXavier.com for example you can get your .CO domain for only $17.99 for the first year if you act before September 30th 2011.
Anyway the sunrise period that started on September 7th will close at October 28th 2011 and some time after that the registry will allow registrations from the public.
EDIT: Here’s a video you can watch about .XXX. The video is done by ICM Registry ( the registry behind .XXX):
