Great movies are unforgettable. But who remembers their domain names? So many words and phrases are now registered that producers are forced to use ugly, hyphenated names, or subdomains. That’s all about to change with the launch of .movie.
Launched by the Donuts registry, this is one new gTLD that could be genuinely useful. Entertainment firm, Lionsgate, has already pioneered it with thehungergames.movie, which is being used right now to promote the November 2015 release of Mockingjay Part 2. (Although there have been questions as to whether the timing of this domain activation broke ICANN rules. ICANN’s compliance department is currently investigating.)
The .movie domain solves the problem of serious overcrowding in .com—freeing up moviemakers to create easily memorable URLs for their latest productions—which will also tie-in neatly with hashtags and social media campaigns.
It will be interesting to see how .movie features in our New gTLD Utilization report, available at newgtld.report. At the moment, .media and .social have the two top spots in our Alternative Top 10 which looks at how successfully the new gTLDs are penetrating the Alexa Top 1 million sites.
Sunrise for .movie starts today.
If you’d like help with a strategy for .movie or other new gTLDs, please get in touch.