I think geographic new gTLD extensions will be among the most successful new gTLD extensions. I believe local businesses will want their new gTLD (either to use or for defensive reasons), and there will be many others who speculate on them for investment purposes, both domain investors and city dwellers.
One of the reasons I believe this is going to happen is because of the support of the cities that must give approval and backing for their associated extension to exist. City governmental organizations might not necessarily need to help promote the new TLD, but I think they benefit if the TLD takes off.
.melbourne domain name is available for businesses. Register your interest align yourself to the #Melbourne brand http://t.co/qkmyUdkMzt
— City of Melbourne (@cityofmelbourne) August 15, 2014
Last week, the City of Melbourne, Australia
helped to promote the .Melbourne domain name extension via its official Twitter account. The City encouraged businesses to register their brand .Melbourne domain name to align with the “#Melbourne brand.” The City of Melbourne Twitter account has nearly 40,000 followers, so it’s a fairly large audience.
It’s interesting to see official city accounts promoting the new gTLDs, but I think a better endorsement would be actually using the new extensions. If the city government began using .Melbourne domain names for its official websites, that would probably be the best endorsement possible. I would not be surprised to see this happen with some of the new geographic gTLD extensions.
I live about 120 km’s from Melbourne and this is the first time I’ve heard about them registering a gTLD extension. I would of thought “.melb” would of made a better handle since it’s a lot shorter to type in.
They must also be on a small budget to promote it since they haven’t advertised it on tv nor in any news broadcasts.
Interesting .melbourne shows about 39 results,
https://www.google.com/?#q=site:.Melbourne