Earlier this week I was in Stockholm for Nordic Domain Days where I spoke about the challenges and opportunities of marketing .irish.
Why’s .irish such an intriguing extension? Well the simple reason is that it “competes” almost directly with the existing country code for Ireland .ie, but has a different value proposition.
Here are my slides from Monday:
(for some stupid reason Slideshare is currently showing my slides as coming from “Neustar” – guess their integration with LinkedIn is a bit broken!)
Sure .ie is the “incumbent” in the Irish market, but .irish could displace it, especially in some markets. Why?
Hassle factor.
At the moment registering a .ie domain name is very cumbersome compared to registering a .irish or a .com
As I mentioned in a recent blog post, .irish comes with several advantages:
”
- They’re easy to register
- The “Irish brand” is strong and choosing a domain that says you are Irish sends a strong message
- You don’t need to provide extra documents or confusing paperwork
- Order a domain at 9am and you’ll be able to use it almost immediately
- Premium domains start at low prices
- Premium .irish domains renew at the standard price
- A lot of great names are available at standard prices”
But like any new top level domain, .irish does face an uphill struggle until it’s widely used and recognised.
As the number of .irish domain names grows, and I am confident that it will, it’ll be interesting to see if the .ie ccTLD will do anything to “defend” its market share.
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