Did you know there is a .LA domain extension? Similar to .TV being for Tuvalu, .CO being for Colombia, and .ME being for Montenegro, .LA is the country code for the southeast Asian country of Laos.

If you’ve heard of .LA or seen .LA domain names advertised, it’s most likely by a domain registrar marketing it as the Los Angeles extension (like the Register.com email that spurred my post). It is probably being marketed in a similar fashion to how the .NYC, .Paris, and other geographic areas intend to market their own gTLDs once ICANN approves them.

Anyone who intends to bid on and win a gTLD should look at the efforts ccTLD registries are making to sell their domain names. They should analyze what is working and what isn’t working. They can monitor the amount of domain registrations along with the ups and downs in registration cycle to see how marketing efforts are paying off.

gTLD registries are going to have to pay a lot of money to manage a registry. I’ve seen a number of extensions that I think will be successful with a strong marketing effort (such as the geos mentioned above), but I’ve also seen a number of head scratchers that just don’t seem to make sense, no matter what the marketing effort will be.

I do think there’s a place for gTLD domain names, and I also think anyone who is pining to manage a registry should pay close attention to what’s working and what isn’t working.

I just read a news release announcing that Top Level Domain Holdings has named Antony Van Couvering its CEO. Van Couvering previously served as the company’s Chief Operating Officer, and he is also CEO of Minds + Machines, a company operated by TLDH.

Van Couvering is one of the most intelligent and well spoken individuals in the domain space. He is an expert in the workings of ICANN, and his appointment to CEO has to do with this expertise. He is also one of the most well-versed individuals when it comes to the new gTLD domain names that are expected to be rolled out in the not so distant future.

Top Level Domain Holdings is a public company, and its stock is traded on the London Stock Exchange, under the symbol TLDH. Congrats to Antony on this well-deserved promotion.

I read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald today about the former President of Monster.com, Bill Warren, who is now working as the Executive Director of DirectEmployers Association, an organization that intends to utilize a network of domain names across the .Jobs domain extension. The effort could give a boost to the .Jobs domain extension, which has been around for a while but hasn’t made inroads in consumer awareness.

According to its website, DirectEmployers Association is a nonprofit HR consortium of leading global employers formed to improve labor market efficiency through the sharing of best practices, research and the development of technology. In total, over 500 large companies such as AT&T, IBM, American Express, and Johnson & Johnson are involved with this organization.

DirectEmployers Association plans to combine its software with regional and career-related .jobs domain names. The article used Atlanta.jobs as an example, and that domain name was registered on February 4, 2010. The domain name currently resides on WowEmployers.com name servers, which are registered to DirectEmployers Association. A reverse IP search of the Atlanta.jobs IP range shows other names such as Florida.jobs, Health.jobs, Europe.jobs, and many others.

According to the SMH article, this is how the organization will work:

Companies that belong to the association pay a $15,000 annual membership fee and will receive prominent placement on the “.jobs” Web sites. Smaller companies can purchase a “.jobs” domain name for about $125 a year and then post jobs for free. They can also work through their state employment agencies, which post jobs online at no charge.

At those prices, the new “.jobs” system could be another online innovation that undercuts what currently exists _ much as the invention of job boards themselves undermined newspaper help-wanted ads.

If this becomes a popular job search tool, it could provide a boost to future gTLDs. .Jobs is a relatively unknown extension, but it has much more actual meaning that extensions like .com, .net, .mobi…etc. It could train people to use actual words such as .Jobs when they are browsing the web.

Of course there will also be major obstacles to this. It will require human resource departments to ensure their listings are placed on the appropriate .jobs websites in addition to their own corporate sites. I am sure they will also use proven websites like CareerBuilder.com and Monster.com, in addition to other sites like TheLadders.com. Likewise, they will also have to get web browsers to visit .Jobs websites, which is something to which most people are unaccustomed.

This is going to be a very interesting project to observe, and it could provide a glimpse into the future if and when gTLD domain names are approved by ICANN.

According to an article in the Las Vegas Review Journal, the operators of the famous Vegas.com website won a key endorsement from Nevada’s Clark County board of commissioners to run the .Vegas gTLD if and when ICANN approves the introduction of these domain name.

The county vote was unanimous, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that Vegas.com’s operators will actually be able to manage the .Vegas suffix. The city of Las Vegas previously endorsed Dot Vegas, Inc., another organization that would like to run the .Vegas gTLD. I personally find it a bit odd that another entity won considering the strength of the Vegas.com brand outside of Las Vegas… but what do I know.

Of course, the big winner in this will be ICANN. I presume both entities are going to have to pay ICANN a LOT of money to apply for the gTLD, and then ICANN can decide whether Clark County or the City of Las Vegas has the greater right to select an organization to manage the registry. This is another big issue that ICANN will need to sort through before they make their decision.

With millions of dollars at stake, all of the minor issues will certainly become major. Since the Clark County commissioners have been told the .Vegas gTLD “eventually could generate millions of dollars in fees for the county,” they probably won’t take a rejection lightly and litigation could follow. I guess it’s a good thing that ICANN is charging so much for applications – the legal fees could become enormous (imagine if the State of New York wants a .NewYork while New York City wants .NYC).

No matter whether Vegas.com gets awarded the .Vegas suffix or not (if/when ICANN approves their introduction), they will still be the winners when people type in things like hotels.Vegas.com and vacation.Vegas.com

The first day of the .CM auctions on Namejet closed yesterday, and the auction cleared $500,000. I was not surprised by this number, but I am surprised about how many people seem to be bidding on .CM domain names. My company did not bid on a single .cm domain auction, despite the perceived need to protect a few of my brands.

There is one overarching reason why I did not bid on the auctions. For the past couple of years, Kevin Ham’s company Reinvent Technology has controlled the traffic for .CM domain names via wildcarding after striking a deal with the Cameroonian government. While the domain names were unregistered for the most part, they forwarded to parking pages where visitors could click to other sites, earning money for the company.

With one entity controlling many of the domain names that are now up for auction, it wouldn’t make sense for me to bid on them, as the deck would be stacked against me. If a particular domain name generates revenue from significant traffic, I would imagine Kevin’s company could bid on it up to its value based on a revenue multiple. It wouldn’t really make sense to bid more than the person who has all of the analytics and would presumably be able to monetize it better than almost anyone.

The argument could be made that the traffic is more valuable for lead gen than PPC. However, I am sure Reinvent did what they could to monetize it as best as possible. Additionally, around 20% of the traffic to my brands with the most type in traffic (my blog not included) comes from type-ins. If just a tiny amount of the traffic was lost due to typing in .CM, it’s probably a very small number, and not even worth the annual renewal fee.

They have some of the smartest people working at the company, and I wouldn’t want to bid against them when they know much more than me. It’s sort of like playing poker when your opponent caught a glimpse of your cards.