New gTLD

It seems that many new gTLD registries would like a second round of new gTLD applications. ICANN has not said when (or if) it will happen. It seems that there will be subsequent application rounds, but it is anybody’s guess when that will occur.

One of the biggest trends in domain names right now is cryptocurrency related domain names. I am not involved in that space, but there has been quite a bit of investment made there. Bloomberg covered the crypto domain trend, and anyone who has been on NamePros and monitors auctions and sales reports has noticed that cryptocurrency domain names have been selling regularly.

If companies could apply for new gTLD extensions now, I think cryptocurrency domain names would be very popular. Some of the extensions I can imagine would have applicants:

Amazon will be building a multi-billion dollar second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, and cities across the United States have submitted proposals to the company highlighting why Amazon should consider their city. TechCrunch posted an article with videos from seven of the perceived front-running cities.

Out of the 7 videos shared by TechCrunch, Las Vegas appears to be the only city to have added a URL to its proposal, and they city used a .Vegas domain name for it: HQ2.Vegas. Some of the other videos used hashtags, and some did not have any further call to action (beyond their full presentations).

Unfortunately for the peanut gallery, HQ2.Vegas seems to require authentication to see the website:

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, which was amplified on Techmeme this afternoon, a company called Brilliant “picked up a $21 million Series A round of funding led by August Capital.” When I saw the name of the company, I was curious about the domain name it is using because I know the company doesn’t own Brilliant.com.

I did a Google search for “Brilliant smart home,” and I saw that the company is using the Brilliant.tech domain name for its website. Off the top of my head, I can’t recall other companies operating on a .Tech domain name that have received this much funding. I think it illustrates that a company doesn’t need to have the exact match .com domain name to be successful.

One thing that might hurt a company like Brilliant is that the Wall Street Journal didn’t link out to Brilliant’s website, and I presume that will be the case with other publications. The news likely caused a traffic spike to Brilliant.com because people tend to assume that companies own the exact match .com domain name of their brand name. As a company in the tech space, Brilliant’s audience may know better to just assume that it has the .com domain name, but the general public tends to be .com centric. Unfortunately, Brilliant doesn’t own BrilliantTech.com, which was registered in 2006.

Brilliant.com is a domain name that is owned and used by

Life Time Fitness, a large health club and fitness business with 127 locations across the United States and Canada, has changed its url. The company is now forwarding LifetimeFitness.com to LifeTime.Life. If you visit LifeTimeFitness.com, you will be forwarded to the new url. The company also announced it will be using the lt.Life domain name as well.

Here is the message on the homepage announcing the url change:

Lifetimefitness.com is now Lifetime.life
You may notice our email address is different. We are now using @lifetime.life and @lt.life.

Here is a screenshot of the homepage with the message across the top:

In my opinion, this change is a bit peculiar. The url the company has been using matches its Life Time Fitness brand name and the new url does not (you can see “Life Time Fitness” in that page title and about us description). My guess is that the company is trying to be simply known as Life Time rather than Life Time Fitness. At least that is the way it looks with the Life Time logo that doesn’t have “Fitness” in it.

The Lifetime.com domain name is owned by