Mercenary Blogger

Got an extra $185,000 lying around? How about using it for a top level domain application?

ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers provided this estimated cost for new TLD applications such as .nyc or .att or even .whatever. A pretty decent investment considering the potential earnings that a lucky party can expect to get if his application is approved. But this one can get expensive really fast. Annual fees to ICANN for example are quoted at $75,000 at least, not to mention the high cost of setting up your own registry.

There are a lot of considerations though, the term ‘application’ for example, $185,000 is a lot of money and if your application isn’t approved I doubt if you will recover the entirety of your application– i.e. if you recover anything at all. There are bound to be similar competing applications and some trademark considerations as well.

But risk is the name of the game, and those who take the risk and emerge successful would definitely get the payback of a lifetime. I can only imagine the number of accountants that would lineup to get their .cpa extensions, or even doctors with their .md.

This is big talk for big players and insignificant little bloggers like me can only watch in the sidelines while the big boys duke it out. I’m pretty sure though that when the smoke clears and everything settles, there will still be a lot of leftover nickels and dimes scattered on the floor ready to be picked by the small players. All we gotta do is brace ourselves and be prepare to take advantage of any opportunity that might present itself.

To dollars and cents!