After news of Afilias acquiring the .mobi registry broke out, the obvious question is: Will Neustar acquire the .tel registry to even out the balance?
There are hardly any benefits from such an acquisition.
The number of registered .mobi domains is approximately one million. That’s one million domains that can be developed, pointed to content or simply parked.
On the other hand, the TelNIC registry – handlers of the .tel TLD – have not announced any numbers since they broke through 250,000 registrations last May. Domains in the .tel realm cannot be developed or pointed to content or any PPC companies.
But they sure make fun commercials.
The real fun will occur in a few weeks on the one year anniversary of the .tel open registration; when these undevelopable domains will be dropped and abandoned en masse.
Neustar is not stupid to acquire such a dodo of a TLD and in our opinion, they won’t.
Did you know .TEL domains are getting a design overhaul and will soon support Google AdSense?
http://telnic.org/newsletters/dottelegraph-feb10.html
Mark, isn’t that an oxymoron? TelNIC adamantly claims the .tel domains aren’t meant to be accessed via the web, so adding AdSense serves exactly what purpose? Would smart phone owners tap on text ads next to the uber-minimal text “content” rendered on .tel domains?
“Will Neustar acquire the .tel registry…”
Hey, how about they start doing something with the .US name space first!
I personally don’t agree with the AdSense thing either. It wouldn’t make sense to enable it on a personal domain like my, http://MarkFulton.tel and I don’t see why a business using .Tel as a contact hub would enable AdSense either.
I do think .tel domains have their place and will adapt and evolve this year. Telnic is doing a phenomenal job promoting, creating a community and an innovative concept for this extension. More so than any other new TLD I have seen launch in my experience.
Soon .tel domains will hop on the social bandwagon and I’ll be more interested. 🙂 The new design (minus the ads) will help alot as they are incorporating recognizable social icons, embedded Google maps, and finally the option to create rich content of your own in the sidebar. Preview here: http://telnic.org/newsletters/feb10/newproxy_final_callouts.jpg
Ugh. It’s Justin’s mugshot again. He would not accept any criticism of the .tel fallacies last year. We’re talking about a registry with horse blinders on.
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