Kanye West Tweets About Yeezy.Supply

Kanye West has been in the news all day because of something he did at the Grammy Awards last night. He also made some news in the domain space for something he tweeted yesterday evening, prior to the Grammys:

00:00:03:21:45:33:05 http://t.co/8T1uPQw7bK

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 8, 2015

It looks to me like Kanye West is announcing a new website or app that will be launched on a .Supply domain name. If you click the Yeezy.Supply link, you can see a countdown timer with just over 3 days remaining. Based on some of the news articles that have been written about this by a variety of news outlets, it looks like Yeezy Supply could be related to a shoe project or sneaker.

Yeezy.Supply was created on February 1 of this year. For those who care, YeezySupply.com was also created on the same day, but the domain name does not resolve or forward. I would assume they are related.

Something like this is pretty good news for Donuts, the operator of .Supply domain names, as well as other new gTLD registry operators. Kanye West has 11.2 million followers on Twitter, and because of what he did at the Grammy Awards last night, I am sure there are a lot of people searching for him on Twitter and elsewhere today. I am also sure the vast majority of Internet users have no idea what .Supply is, but they will learn that it is a domain name extension by seeing West promote it.

I don’t really think West’s usage of a .Supply domain name is going to lead to a significant increase in registrations for .Supply domain names, but at this point, educating people about the existence of alternative domain name extensions is probably equally important to selling the domain names.

I reached out to a representative from Donuts to inquire about whether there is any type of sponsorship or partnership between Donuts and West, and I’ll post an update if or when I hear back from the company.

Update from Donuts’ Mason Cole:

“This is an effort by Kanye West, but we’re very pleased he’s chosen .SUPPLY. As someone on the cutting edge of marketing and pop culture, clearly there’s value in the domain name for him and we’re looking forward to seeing how he puts this name to use. It’s a great example of the value and utility of new gTLDs.”