Apple is the operator of the .Apple new gTLD extension. I noticed an interesting domain name registration earlier this morning, courtesy of my DomainTools registrant monitor tool: Apple registered Hello.Apple. This might not seem like big news, but I think it is notable considering nTLDStats.com reports there are only 5 .Apple domain names currently registered.
At the present time, Hello.Apple does not resolve to an active website or any sort of landing page. When I visited, in fact, I was taken to an ISP error page rather than anything on Apple’s website. The domain name does have Apple nameservers set up, so it looks like the company plans to use it at some point.
A Google site:.Apple search showed me just three .Apple domain names being used right now:
- Experience.Apple
- Newsroom.Apple
- Nic.Apple
All three of these Google-indexed domain names forward to a page within Apple’s Apple.com website rather than being used for a standalone website.
Should Apple use Hello.Apple in a marketing campaign, it could provide a boost to the visibility of the new gTLD program. Google uses its .Google somewhat regularly, and I think that has exposed more people to the new extensions and shown people that Google is okay with using the new domain names.
As you may know already, the simple word “Hello” is meaningful in Apple’s past and present . The company has said “hello” many times, including on its devices when they are turned on for the first time. Hello even played a major role in its iPhone Super Bowl commercial in 2007. Put simply, “Hello” is more than a word at Apple, and it is very interesting to see the company register this Hello.Apple domain name.
I would guess Apple plans to use Hello.Apple at some point in the near future. I can’t imagine the company registered it without a reason. I will keep an eye on it to see what comes of Hello.Apple.
Other .apple domain names and create dates are as below:
nic.apple -> 22 January 2016
newsroom.apple -> 14 September 2017
share.apple -> 8 February 2018
experience.apple -> 18 August 2018
edge.apple -> 20 December 2018
https://dofo.com/search/?extension=apple&sort=cdate_a
Nice tool – thanks for sharing.
“I can’t imagine the company registered it without a reason.”
I would say that is the most likely explanation. It is getting rather late for .brand experiments, that was 5 years ago.
.Yawn
It’ll quickly .fizzleout and .die, just like all of the other PieceOf.Crap ntlds out there.
Interestingly, it appears that they deleted the hello.apple domain name shortly after registering it.
That is interesting. Wonder why they did it.
The company also appears to have registered and deleted Hello.Beats.
“A Google site:.Apple search showed me just three .Apple domain names…”
The fact that you have to resort to a Google search in order to identify 2LD’s within a .brand TLD illustrates the fundamental brokenness of .brand TLD’s in general.
Outside of the community of persons who are interested in selling their services to put together .brand TLD applications, provide back-end services for .brand TLDs, and assorted other hangers-on, you will find little practical interest in .brand TLDs for this very reason: There is no “obvious home address” for a site within a .brand TLD.
Brands are normally used to identify a product such as +, like “Toyota trucks” or “Trojan condoms”. It’s not normal in English to place the brand second. So even if you knew, for example, that Toyota had a .brand tld, what is the obvious “guessable” URL? car.toyota? cars.toyota? Individual model numbers, etc.? That is true for almost any brand. Or should the “obvious” primary URL be brand.brand?
It would make a certain amount of sense if TLDs were allowed to have wildcarding or some synthesized DNS results other than definite DNS entries for each 2LD. That way, it wouldn’t matter what someone guessed at, which might as well be whatever.apple, and they could process ‘whatever’ as a string input to locate or generate the best fit to whatever it is the person might be looking for. That approach makes more sense for a brand like “Yamaha”, which makes anything from pianos to motorcycles.
It’s sort of amusing that new TLD critics rightfully ask, “Where is the innovation?” when all of the new TLDs were hammered into a cookie-cutter approach that assumed a standard set of use cases for them. Any possible innovation, such as the ‘TLD as database mechanism’ for, say, vehicle identification numbers, was thoroughly beaten out of the template that has been applied to all of them.
But the “brand interests” within ICANN are more accurately described as primarily consisting of “brand-servicing interests” which would very much like to sell their clientele a new service.
I dont think brand domains are even supposed to be a big deal, they are rather like a luxury business card – which people really just take once, scan the contacts with their phone and then never touch it again. Yet the momentary impression when you hold it still matters. Likewise brand domains are not for search availability, they are not for direct type-in availability, they are just to be posted somewhere as a good looking url one only needs to click, to show off, like, see, that is our level. In fact, they can work perfectly fine in social media campaigns, like instagram – imagine an ad with link like drive.toyota that is descriptive in itself.
Aside from domainers and tech people who would be impressed by these url’s? Most would be confused as the extension is missing.