Choosing an internet brand

Our domain name was the result of months of searching, brainstorming, cursing, anger and disgust at people who register domain names for fun or to sell them back to you. New enterprises are being cut off at the head by selfish, profit hunting domain hoggers! Launchpad.com, an excellent domain for our start up is being sat on and will only accept bids in excess of $1,250,000! Unbelievable yet its not just the premium domain names. We searched through well over a thousand names which had been registered and parked. The world if internet branding needs to be addressed by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Right now, ICANN is changing the domain name registration options. In November 2009 they started excepting bits for .whatever domains. This will allow the user a degree of freedom when branding their internet start-ups; we could register www.ideas.launchpad and all for the small fee of $185,000! Oh yeah, we also have to run a registry for the .launchpad domain. This might be possible for Virgin Corporation or a country, but it will hardly help the poor entrepreneur!

A possible solution would be to require domains to be active or to forbid them from re-registering after a period of inactivity. Unfortunately, domains simply re-direct to other used websites owned by the registrar. I wish i had the solution to this problem.

There is a silver lining however - Internet branding has proved that real word domains are not essential, i.e. Google or Yahoo! Blogs, brand design, social marketing, viral media and consumer interaction will develop a nonsense word into the next big thing. Its easy to see that the future of internet branding will be in creative and supported names. So don't despair in your branding mission, think way outside of the box and think about which suffix best suites your website/ company.

Don't forget the .biz, co.uk, .net etc domains - not everyone needs a .com!

Good luck,

Tom for the launchlings.com team