Chris Sheridan shared a great Q&A video interview with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp Europe 2016. At around the 20 minute mark of the video, Matt discusses the .Blog new gTLD domain extension that was acquired by WordPress earlier this year.

The discussion focused around the revenue sources for Auttomatic, the parent company of WordPress. Previously, there were three revenue “buckets” for the company, but the .Blog extension is poised to become the fourth bucket. In fact, Matt has big plans for .Blog domain names, and he predicted selling .Blog domain names “could be a multi $100 million business.”

VentureBeat reported that the .Blog extension was acquired for $19 million, although Matt is a bit coy in this interview due to what I presume are legal reasons.

.Blog is definitely an extension that I will be watching, especially when it comes to the marketing of these domain names. WordPress has a massive audience and .Blog is an extension that should see considerable traction.

Have a look at the video interview below:

I was reading Techmeme this morning where I learned about a new startup called Public, which was written about in Variety. Before reading the entire article, I hovered over the first mention of Public to see what domain name they are using for this venture. Interestingly, they chose to use a new gTLD domain name for its website:  Public.chat.

Public was founded by Avner Ronen, an experienced Internet entrepreneur. Here’s how the Variety article described what Public is and does:

“Public, which launched with an iPhone app and website Friday, can best be described as group chats with an audience. A few active participants chat with each other on a topic, be it “Game of Thrones,” a sports team or “Black Arts & Literature.” All these discussions happen in public, allowing anyone to follow them in real-time or read up on them later. And chats can be embedded on other websites as well as shared via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.”

It  is neat that the company chose

As an industry, we should probably stop using SEO as an “advantage” in new gTLDs. It’s proving not to be necessary or advantageous for us when we do that. If SEO or PPC benefits are fair, the same, or slightly better in some cases, that’s all we really need. I think it should be a side-point.

A recent sponsored post by Rightside on the Search Engine Land website stated in the title that a lawyer “discovered that migrating from a .com to a .attorney domain can drive organic traffic and save on SEM costs”. Although I don’t doubt the veracity of any statement in the article, this is the second time an article like that stirred Google to respond in a way that undermines industry credibility. It happened before in 2012 when Adrian Kinderis titled and article, “New top-level domains to trump .com in Google search results”. Matt Cutts responded very publicly, within a day or two, stating, “Sorry, but that’s just not true…” This time a rebuke was issued seven days later on the exact same website where the sponsored post appeared. There have been a few other discrediting rebukes like this in between. You would think, as an industry, that we have learned by now.

I’d like to point out that Bill Hartzer’s research at Globerunner is fair