This week, news of Amazon’s acquisition of Twitch was widely reported. If you are like me and hadn’t heard of Twitch before this news, you may have simply navigated to Twitch.com to learn more. If you did that, you would have landed on the wrong website since the Twitch that Amazon plans to acquire is not found on a .com domain name but rather a .TV domain name: Twitch.TV.
The New York Times has been covering the acquisition, and yesterday the newspaper published an article by Noam Cohen that discussed the .TV extension. In the first line of the article, the question was posed, “Is the dot-tv boom next?” The article had quite a bit of history about the .TV domain name extension, and although I was familiar with some of it, there were quite a few interesting aspects I didn’t know before reading the article.
Some of the things I found particularly interesting:
- China.TV reportedly sold for $100k
- “in 1999, a start-up named DotTV paid Tuvalu $50 million over 12 years for the right to sell .tv to other companies.”
- “payments to Tuvalu’s government are said to be a couple million dollars a year.”
- ” Peter Kay has owned Twitch.com since the mid-1990s. Before Twitch.tv, which was started just three years ago, he had barely any traffic to his site. Now, he routinely gets 40,000 unique visitors a day for his site, which promotes his music educational apps; “
I don’t really follow the .TV extension, but I understand that there are quite a lot of domain investors who are active investors in this space. With the new gTLDs, I believe people are more apt to focus on the right of the dot, and .TV obviously makes sense for some businesses like Twitch. I don’t know if this acquisition is going to propel .TV domain name values, but it certainly is a boost to the extension in the added eyeballs that are sure to learn about Twitch.TV.
As always, your comments are welcome, and you are certainly invited to share your thoughts about .TV domain names and this reported acquisition.
Thanks to Niko Younts for sharing the NYT article with me this morning.
“Now, he routinely gets 40,000 unique visitors a day for his site, which promotes his music educational apps; on Tuesday, he got 60,000 visitors. Yesterday, he sold 10 apps about Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” at $5.99 each.”
60,000 visitors a day and only 10 sales. What a waste of all that traffic.
Maybe he should become an amazon affiliate for twitch.tv and start selling video games on twitch.com that would up his conversion rate
Risky given the exact-match nature of both domains. Could find himself battling an Amazon UDRP … or worse, a federal lawsuit.
cnn.tv is now active – they actually started marketing it