The .NYC registry management team retweeted a tweet from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio who was encouraging people to visit a city website for more information about registering to vote. The tweet was off interest to me because the website the Mayor referenced is found on a .NYC domain name – Voting.NYC:
ATTENTION NEW YORK CITY: the deadline to change parties before the New York Primary is THIS FRIDAY.
Don’t sit this one out — head to https://t.co/EJhQZ3CtEk right now for more information. #DemocracyNYC pic.twitter.com/h0q5NK1RIq
— Mayor Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) February 12, 2020
The City of New York has a relationship with Neustar, which manages the .NYC extension. The City uses the NYC.gov domain name for its official website, so it is interesting that NYC is also using .NYC domain names for official business like this.
From what I can tell, it looks like Voting.NYC is a simple one page lander with informational links to other websites. It would seem this is more of a marketing landing page than anything, so it’s interesting they chose to use the .NYC domain name for this purpose. Because the city government website is on a .gov domain name operated by the US federal government, they probably wouldn’t have an easy time getting a simple and memorable domain name like this one. I also think Voting.NYC is better than NYCVoting.gov. NYCVoting.com is registered but does not have an active website.
From a domain investment point of view, it’s certainly positive that the government pretty much endorses and promotes .NYC domain names by using them. There are 173 .NYC sales in NameBio, and I believe quite a few of them were from .NYC registry auctions.
There are many examples of this:
mystudent.nyc (Parents can view their child’s grades, attendance and exam history)
myschools.nyc (Parents apply for K-12 school for their children)
cte.nyc (Career and Technical Education)
Vote.nyc (Board of Elections)
voting.nyc
archives.nyc (NYC Department of Records & Information Services)
edc.nyc (Economic Development Corporation)
women.nyc (City Gov. Initiative, part of NYC Economic Development Corporation)
chamber.nyc (Greater New York Chamber of Commerce)
open-data.nyc (city data made public for accountability and transparency)
dotmobility.nyc (Department of Transportation – Mobility Management)
Then there are many non-city, yet official organizations using .nyc:
garmentdistrict.nyc
hispanicchamber.nyc
centralastoria.nyc
Also other examples of .nyc domains being used as forwarders:
labs.council.nyc
bronxplanning.nyc
healthandmentalhygiene.nyc
cityhalllibrary.nyc (Records)
notify.nyc (alert system)
dhs.nyc (Depoartment of Homeless Services)
bonds.nyc (City financial services and bond products)
boe.nyc (Board of Elections)
studentperceptionsurvey.nyc (annual student experience survey)
This partnership between the City of New York and Neustar has been working really well to grow the namespace organically. Meaning real usage.
Forgot registration numbers dropping by a few thousand if real usage and awareness is up.
I’ll be writing more about geoTLDs, and specifically official government agencies using .nyc domains in the next few weeks at http://www.developed.nyc
Vote.nyc seems to be much more comprehensible. And a better site too.
Yep I agree. Also voting.nyc has an issue with their SSL certificate – the https version of the site doesn’t work but the http does. Pretty terrible for a website related to elections.
One of the few I like but don’t have nexus.
Interesting that they don’t use the www in the name. I think more people understand when they see the dot then we give them credit for.
If it’s mostly a social media campaign, it will automatically hyperlink.
I think that the fact that twitter was onboard with turning all word.words into links was a major boost to new Gs (understanding, adoption, usage and general outlook).
Imagine they didn’t convert to links – would have been a huge negative in the same way if email forms continued to expect ___@____.com. There are still some issues with some sites with @___.newext but major improvement over 3 years ago.
site is well done…nice UX/UI