I should have clarified in more words so as to not doublespeak. I have a challenge in spending way too many words being precise about what I say so I’ve been practiciing being concise.

What I am saying is that my company does new TLDs, so we are reaching out to people and gauging their interest on running one, but as part of our effort, the website is set up so that there’s tons of information to remove the confusion and help educate on new TLDs.

What we have happening is that many are unaware of new TLDs when we talk or we get folks emailing us or contacting us to find out more because they want to know how to register one now that they stumbled upon their existence.

So we’re getting a lot of inquiries to Minds + Machines when people come aware of the new TLD availability and they use our site as a way to review and learn about the process. John Q Public gets totally excited about it once they hear and they wonder why the widespread media is not covering it.

Hope that clarifies.

That educational divide is why the domain marketplace continues to carry such opportunity. If you ask the general public, outside of those who make a primary living in domains, hosting, or aftermarket, many / most of them will still say that Network Solutions runs all the domain stuff on the internet.

When we see a wider cross-section of applicants and strings in 2010 we will certainly see a diversity of use cases and business models that we’ve not had thus far.

The ICANN meeting in Sydney is in two weeks. There will be many announcements in and around the week of June 21st that should bring a bit more attention and attraction to a wider section of the public at large about new Top Level Domains.

@David
I’m friends with the .Travel people so I’ll be diplomatic about responding, but you have a solid point. .Travel is a great TLD in principle.

I’d say that a fair counterpoint might be that other new TLDs do have high demand from what I am seeing. We will have the opportunity to witness TLDs execute their launches, policies, etc differently than .Travel has. The important point is that there is a wide difference between that execution and how it translates into registration volume or public demand, even though they’re married.

TLDs executed with sensible restrictions and market compatible pricing in harmony with good marketing — that are strings that do hold some affinity, allegiance or attraction to natural visitors and use — these TLDs will thrive.

There is large market demand for new TLDs. Watch for announcements the week of June 22nd.

ICANN, to their credit has (wisely) built in to the new TLD program a 4 month outreach period to raise awareness of the new TLDs.

This should hopefully mitigate the confusion expressed in that article and study.