Author: Could

The Board of ICANN made two major announcements yesterday:

They work on weekends and holidays.

They are expanding the Top Level Domains (TLDs) available.

What that means is, if you have at least $185K you’ll be able to get a domain like .travel or .toyota or whatever your heart desires. But what does that mean for online marketers?

Courtesy of Melbourne IT DBS

SEO

As Danny Sullivan has already said, the use of a TLD like “bank” probably won’t affect your actual rankings. But what about click-through rate?

Put yourself in the eyes of your average search engine user (i.e., someone who isn’t an online marketer). If you saw a search result that had the TLD that matched your search, in addition to a solid title and description, would you be more inclined to click on that result? After all, it adds authority to your result that most of the others probably won’t have. Before you even get to a site you can tell whether or not it is on topic to your search based on that TLD.

Couldn’t it also confuse users, too? We’re all trained to go to .com or .org—will not seeing one of the traditional TLDs associated with the domain make it seem spammy? After more details are released about the new TLDs, it would be interesting to conduct a survey of what the average search engine user will think when they see a branded TLD.

This all, of course, assumes they even look at TLDs to begin with. They could very well care less about them.

PPC

While I don’t profess to be a PPC expert, I have to imagine including a brand-specific TLD could help improve your click-throughs. That’s what I asked Kate Morris of Distilled who speaks often about PPC:

No, I actually don’t. No more than they do now. I think they might over time, but that’s if the brands play along and the public is educated about what they are. This is going to be a small thing for some time, but it ultimately might mean more trust. I am not sure this is the best thing for good small businesses. It’ll really just free up three characters.

Who could benefit?

The new TLDs that will be created as a result of yesterday’s announcement seem poised to have an impact a few years from now. They actually won’t even be fielding applications until the beginning of next year. However, it does create a cool way to create branded domains for the big spenders out there. Think of the cool marketing opportunities that’ll be created—both online and offline. Picture a magazine ad for a new Toyota car that has a domain like “rav4.toyota” on it.

At this point, I could see it benefiting the tech-friendly brands the most. Even for Raven it could be a great way to hand out promo URLs. Say we have a special offer at a conference we are sponsoring, we could use a domain like “pubcon.raven” on our promo materials. I would imagine that would be much easier to remember than a subdomain. (Though it might still confuse the hell out of the average user.) But as I mentioned, I want to know if it has any impact on click-throughs for both SEO and PPC before making any changes.

One final area it will be interesting to keep an eye on is around new business ventures created off of the generic TLDs that will become available. While this release is more geared towards brands, the opportunity to create an social-network type site is on the table. Say if you bought the TLD “.family”, you could then turn around and sell domains off of it where people could connect with their family members (like pratt.family).

You could do the same thing with a TLD like “.news” and sell of domains like tech.news to various tech news sites like Technorati or Gawker Media.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned in my time in this industry, it’s that it is full of some very smart and innovative people. What new business ventures that come with these new TLDs will be a perfect example of that.

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Nearly a year ago, I wrote a post titled “Is Android Surging Only Because Apple Is Letting It?“. Not surprisingly, it fired people up. About 1,000 comments later, there was a full-on fanboy war between the Apple and Google sides. But the point was actually something we can look back on. Was Android surging ahead of the iPhone in the United States because Apple only had a deal with AT&T?

Let’s revisit, shall we?

At the point that post was written, the Verizon iPhone was just a rumor. It was an oft-cited rumor, but still just a rumor. Apple had a deal with one carrier in the U.S., AT&T. Meanwhile, there were Android devices on all four major U.S. carriers. And by all accounts, the ones being sold by Verizon were doing the best in terms of sales.

20+ phones on four carriers (including the nation’s largest) were outselling one phone on one carrier. It was really shocking.

It wasn’t until four months after the post that Verizon officially announced they were getting the iPhone. At it was a full five months later that it actually went on sale. That was roughly one quarter ago, so the data has started to trickle in and take shape. And guess what? It sure looks like the iPhone on a second carrier, Verizon, halted Android’s march.

In April, when NPD data had the iPhone market share push a bit forward while Android saw a small decline, it was perhaps a bit too early to read into it. But a month later, Nielsen data suggested that Android share was indeed flattening, and most credited the 2.2 million iPhones Verizon sold in the two months of its existence on the carrier as the reason.

A few days ago, a report by Needham using IDC data suggested that Android’s market share peaked in March, and was now on the decline as Apple’s share was rising again. This was the first quarterly share decline that Android had ever seen.

Why? It seems obvious, doesn’t it?

Earlier today, BTIG Research put out a report showing that in both AT&T and Verizon stores across the country, the iPhone is now the top selling device in most stores. Four months ago, the iPhone did not exist in Verizon stores. Now it’s easily outselling any Android device in the majority of stores.

To be fair, as before, the sheer number of different Android devices out there means they’re undoubtedly still outselling the iPhone when combined together. But the market share numbers suggest that even this discrepancy has collapsed. That’s pretty amazing.

And let’s keep something in mind — by most accounts, the Verizon iPhone launch was not the massive blow-out many were predicting. Why? It’s likely that a sizable chunk of would-be Verizon iPhone buyers believed a newer model would launch in the summertime, just a few months away, just like it always had in the past.

That turned out not to be the case, and it now looks like the iPhone 5 will launch this fall. But Apple gave no guidance on that either way. So a lot of customers have been left waiting. (Though the white iPhone helped a bit.)

And guess what happens when the iPhone 5 does launch in the fall on both Verizon and AT&T? It’s going to be massive. So massive that I wouldn’t be surprised if the one device does actually reverse the Android’s march forward. At the very least, it will do so in the short term.

Yes, one device on two carriers could well outsell dozens of devices on four carriers.

And if and when the government approves the AT&T/T-Mobile deal (which is BS, but will happen), we’ll see the iPhone on the top two of three carriers in the U.S. Apple doesn’t really need Sprint anymore, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the iPhone on the carrier next year.

So in that regard, the Android vs. iPhone argument is becoming a more fair one in the U.S. market. Apple is never going to make dozens of devices to match Android in “choice”, but the carrier part of the equation is being negated.

In other words, at least in part, Android is no longer surging because Apple is no longer letting it.

[image: flickr/victoria white2010]

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Android

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