Opening Day
After months (years?) of preparation, with a little test-run during the Sunrise period, your TLD is finally ready to throw open its doors. This might seem like a simple matter, but it’s not — not if you want to make any money, or avoid mass confusion. When you get to “steady state” the prevailing rule is “first come, first served” but the Landrush period is a window during which time stands still.
Minds + Machines Landrush Strategies
During a Landrush period, you establish a “window” – a time during which applications can be made. Just as in the Sunrise period (but with no trademark validation this time), customers go to any registrar offering your TLD and make their application.
Once you have all the applications in, you will need to apply your allocation scheme — who gets what name? In the past, a round-robin scheme was often used, so that one name was picked from Registrar A, the next from Registrar B, then C, and so on until you came back to Registrar A again. This sounds fair, but it was gamed by registrars who created hundreds of shell companies and got them accredited with ICANN just so they would have more turns in each round.
More recently, companies have turned to auctions, which don’t appear to be as susceptible to organized gaming strategies. There are other methods as well. Which method you use depends on the number of expected customers, the type of TLD you have, and the community (if any) that you serve.
A Landrush is not just a technical thing
The biggest error made with the Landrush — and we say this advisedly, because there have been some doozies — is Bad Marketing. Because TLDs are all run by Internet geeks, at least so far, they tend to view the Landrush as a technical issue with a technical solution. There is definitely a technical aspect, but what’s important about a Landrush is that it’s Opening Day. It’s when you go live, it’s when you begin life as a real TLD registry.
If you were opening a bricks-and-mortar store, you would certainly make sure that the doors opened wide enough to accommodate the throngs of shoppers, but you probably would not neglect to make sure that the throngs actually showed up. You would let people know about Opening Day — you would do marketing. And yet in the domain world what everyone does is the equivalent of oiling the door hinges to make sure they opened smoothly, forgetting that without customers, you can’t make a sale.
Each TLD should be marketed in a manner that fits; there isn’t one size fits all. If you think your TLD should be marketed the same way as someone else’s, that should tell you that maybe you don’t have a unique offering. Minds + Machines has a great deal of experience in marketing TLDs and can help you make sure that when those doors open, the throngs are there.
