NamesCon 2016 Sponsor Spotlight on .Feedback Registry

Just a few days to go until attendees will begin arriving in Las Vegas for NamesCon! We are expecting somewhere around 1,200 conference attendees. There will be attendees from all facets of the domain name business.

This morning’s NamesCon 2016 sponsor spotlight interview is with the team from the .feedback Registry and Jay Westerdal, founder of .feedback. The team answered questions about .feedback domain names  and he shared some thoughts about the new gTLD domain names and NamesCon.

If you have any questions for Jay about .feedback, please leave them in the comment section. See you soon!

Introduce your company.

We’re the “.feedback” top level domain and we’re aiming to be something a little different. A few years ago while talking with local businesses we discovered that there’s a major communication gap between businesses and their customers. That created an opening for them to be bullied by newcomers like Yelp or Zagat. So we decided to champion the little guy by creating a way for them to easily and quickly close that feedback loop while complementing their existing web presence and brand. And then we went a step further: anyone can purchase our domains and rate anything they wish. One awesome benefit with our .feedback sites is that they provide Gold Stars on Search Engine Results and better help market the organization. No technical knowledge is required in our TLD to run a feedback microsite because by default the domains are provided with hosting and software. It’s a turn-key way for organizations of all types to leverage the same tools that big companies like Amazon are already using. For the first time in domain registrations, it takes 10 minutes to have a full web-presence without worrying about hosting, DNS, or nameservers. It just works.

What is your company’s mandate, what sets you apart?

We think that microsites are the future of review marketing. Having a marketing message “find us on…” makes your business funnel too sloppy. Consumers get lost and distracted navigating around. We aim to shake up the industry of reviews, feedback, and survey tools. Our prices will be insanely low but our products will surpass the technical limits of our competitors. Feedback tools on the market right now run into the thousands of dollars a year. We replace all that with a low yearly domain registration fee.

Who benefits from your product or service?

Anyone! Everyone! If you want to learn more about a product from reading honest unbiased feedback then this is the TLD for you. All .feedback domains are required to accept feedback and we make it super simple to accomplish this by putting up a default website that is easy to customize.

What factors have contributed to your company’s growth and success?

We have already seen a large amount of companies register during sunrise. However we have seen a lot of defensive registrations that don’t really get our grand vision. Our space is designed to be an open university of thoughts and ideas. Taking a name to hoard it and pointing it towards a parking page or not resolving it is not allowed in our TLD. Owning a domain that provides no value to end users is something that we are taking a hard stand on. Thankfully we supply the tools by default to do this. If a large company wants to run their own website they can select the self-serve DNS option.

How would you define your company strategy and vision?

We want to empower microsites that take on Yelp. We are providing tools to companies to accept trusted 3rd party reviews. The benefits of using our sophisticated feedback platform are that gold stars can be put next to your domain in regular Bing search engine results or in Google Ads.  The requirement for ratings to appear in search engines are that a trusted third party moderates the impartial nature of the review. We let domain owners be the first layer of screening a flagged review, but ultimately if the review is fair and honest the domain owner must allow the review to stay.

What’s the story behind how your company was founded?

Jay Westerdal is our founder, he created DomainTools. He knows how to work with big data and scale large sites. After he sold DomainTools he wanted to start a broader information company. With 300 Million domains in the world and a population of 7 Billion the domain density in the world is 4%. However if you look at actual owners (50 million people) the domain ownership density drops to 0.6%. That is why the domain industry is so small and everyone knows each other. By tackling other industries using domains we can hope to grow domain ownership rates. Registering a domain is easy but hosting, building and running a website are much harder and take a lot of skill sets that most small business don’t have. We want to take all the hassle out of niche microsites that serve a narrow purpose.

What major milestones has your company accomplished?

Building a platform that can scale and take the demands of an entire TLD was the biggest accomplishment. Even with all the features we currently have, the platform will continue to gain new features each month. The platform is a tool that will continue to get more powerful over time.

How will your company engage attendees at the upcoming NamesCon?

>We are asking attendees to rate NamesCon at www.NamesCon.feedback. We have awesome fortune cookies at our booth available only to people that have made a review. Each cookie has a 20% chance to win a prize. We have several cookies with $100 cash prizes. We are wishing everyone has good fortune and a prosperous new year. So stop by the booth and show us your review on the site and claim your fortune!

Where can attendees find out more about your company, product or services while at NamesCon?

The best place to look is www.nic.feedback, we list all of our registrars there. We are very open to questions at our booth and would love to demonstrate the functionality we offer. But if you want to have some fun, check out www.donaldtrump.feedback or www.hillaryclinton.feedback.

What are your thoughts on the new TLDs?

Dot Com is king however new TLDs will much appreciate faster. So as a new domainer I would look into land rushing new TLDs for awesome great domains. You may look back in 20 years and pay for your entire grandson’s education by selling just one domain.

What are you looking forward to most at the upcoming conference?

Seeing who gets their head shaved for charity is always fun to watch.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

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