CloudFlare Interviews Chris Sheridan about New TLDs at Parallels 2013

Hi, I'm here with Chris Sheridan, the VP of Business Development from Enom.

Welcome. Thank you for having me. Great to be here again.

Again, yes. You're back. We did this six months ago.

We did.

Excited to talk about all the new things that has happened in the last six months.

Exactly. A lot.

Well, so I saw your announcement last week that you made this big announcement about the new TLD's integration with West. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, last time we spoke, we were still kind of in the infancy of the whole tools that we were building and thinking about what services we're going to offer to resellers for new TLDs. Fast forward to today. We expect new TLDs to finally go live in Q2. So mid year. That's really great. We're talking about 1400 new extensions on the Internet. There's been a lot of work done by ICANN and the registrar community and everything is really starting to come together where we're at a stage where we're here at Parallels to talk about tools available for resellers to start selling TLDs or registrars or parallels customers.

That's awesome. So 1400 new TLD.

Yes.

I mean, that's a lot. It is business. And I'm going to register in my new site or my new domain. How do I think about which one to choose?

You know, I think first of all, it's a great question and a big part of what we've been doing is we have to drive awareness for consumers to even realize that this is coming. Right? And so like one of the tools that we put out there is this new TLD Watch list. So we have many partners using this, they have it on their site, they say, hey, new TLDs are coming. You can browse them by category. So maybe you're a small business and you look at, you know, small business category, or you know, just business category, and you see DOT Shop or DOT Online or DOT LLC or DOT Corp, and you start to kind of like get new TLDs into the subconscious of consumers, right? So this tool's been really powerful, simple, easy to use. And then I think once TLDs go live, this is where the registries will start coming in to help market new TLDs. The registrar community will start really branding around new TLDs, raising the visibility of new TLDs. But I think one of the other big things too is we have a lot of brands in this space. So you have companies like Google, they applied for 101 new TLDS and I think like don't bring a lot of visibility to the new TLD space in general. Amazon as well is in there and Yahoo. So these are big brands that do a great job raising awareness on no matter what they center around. So I think they'll be good for new tlds.

That's interesting because there was a lot of controversy around these bigger companies like Apple, Google buying all these tlds. But from your perspective, you think it will help drive awareness for the larger marketplace.

I think a lot of people expected registrars to do this. Like ENAM is going to be a registry. We applied for 26 TLDS. The, the reality is though that when we all found out last year, June13, the big reveal, which is when you and I sat down, we had finally found out that Google was involved and Amazon has applied and Apple had applied for new TLDs. And this is great to finally know for a fact that these companies are excited about this part of the domain space. Right. So yeah, so it is good and it's good for people to hear that. And I think it just, to me it's like validating this whole program when you get big companies like that involved.

So when you look through all the TLDs and whether it's one of the 26 that Enom's going to offer or the broader list, what are some of your favorites that stand out?

Favorite? You know, I have to go on, I have to like put my ENOM hat on. But Dot Ninja is by far probably the biggest TLD in our inventory that's gotten the most attention. Like we're here walking the floor today with Dot Ninja shirts and it's just a funny tld. Like people really rally around it, you know, it's just gotten a lot of good buzz. But I think other TLDs, like Dot Web has been pretty talked about, you know, and I think one TLD that is actually getting a lot of traction but you just don't hear too much about it. Maybe in our circles are IDN internationalized domain names. So you know, to get native language, native language, it's pretty historic. That's a big deal. Like obviously we're in the us we're very focused on generic tlds. But when you go to Europe and Asia and Australia, well, maybe not so much Australia, but the multilingual TLDs are really big. That's a big deal for the Internet to have the dot TLD in that native language. So that's pretty exciting. That is exciting.

And so will Enoch be offering those tlds.

Our goal will be to offer as many tlds as possible through the various solutions. You know, we just want as many companies as possible to participate in this. That's amazing.

Well, Chris, if you were going to say, what's the one thing you're really excited about in 2013?

Yes. Well, I'll tell you the one thing, honestly, and I've been like harping on it, but I'm actually, I'm going to be very excited the day that first TLD goes live. You know, that day is the start of this historic two year process where 1000 plus TLD's will be going live every month or, sorry, you know, over two years a thousand plus TLDs will have gone live. But it'll all begin with that first day when that first TLD hits the net, you know, and that's like a day I think in our industry people won't forget.

And just broadly, like you said, it's going to be the day that no one forgets.

What do you think will be the.

Overall impact of all these new TLDs on the web?

Yeah, well, I think, you know, right now, once we get beyond distribution, we get beyond registrars adopting it, I think, you know, this is a chance for consumers to really get their passions online or really identify, really create a space on the Internet that's really about themselves. So if I'm a fan of basketball, basketball is a perfect TLD for me. If I'm in the fishing business, fishing is a perfect TLD for me. You know, this is, when you look at these TLDs, they're very vertical and so I think it's really great. It's a different way to express yourself online. It's a different way to show your passions online. It brings different nuances to search now and how you look for bank, you know, how you look for other types of companies online, attorney law. So these are just examples I think of. As people start really rallying around these different extensions and the visibility gets out there, I think it's going to change the way we really surf the net and look for domains online.

I mean, you see this huge wave of personalization and this is just one more, like you said, it's an expression of you or your business, of yourself, to fail to really express yourself. Do you think that at all? Is this going to be the decline of the dot com?

You know, I've always been very hesitant to say, oh, you know, we're going after dot com. I think, like, that's the wrong way to look at it. I think, you know, the Internet industry, it's about 250 million plus domains right now and it's growing very nicely year over year. And that is a great proof point for. I think there's more room for new TLDs to come in there. And I think, like, it's not. It's really about getting in front of the right audience and giving them a heads up that your TLD is now online dot phishing or law or lawyer, you know, whatever the case may be. Dot Corp. Ninja. Right. But I don't think it's, you know, I think we're trying to really approach these audiences in a very methodical way and get those different communities rallied around their TLD using it. And I think that can coexist with cobb. All right, well, absolutely.

Chris, thank you so much for your time today and I look forward to Christhe ninja.

Chris Sheridan, Ninja. I'm going to reserve that so you can't register. Thank you so much. Great to be here.