HEXONET recently attended The Domain Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  This inaugural event was hosted over 4 days and featured informative content sessions and excellent opportunities for networking.  Some of the popular topics of discussion, included, the growing importance of the Chinese domain market (especially the aftermarket activity for short number and single / two-character domains), best places to sell domain names (and what brokers to use), the new gTLD domain namespace, and development.

The new gTLDs were discussed in many of the panel sessions. There have been some great successes over the past year among the several hundred new gTLDs that were launched. In fact, over 8 million new gTLD domains have been registerd worldwide. However, despite the volume of new registrations, it was acknowledged that overall consumer awareness of new gTLDs is still very low. This will be one of the key challenges for the industry moving forward.

The plan is for more development and finding ways to increase usage of the new gTLDs to drive awareness.  In conjunction, the industry needs a way to organize and display relevant domain searches given the deluge of new extensions. Evolving domain search methodologies and technologies will be critical to the growth and acceptance of new gTLDs.  And with some of the most highly anticipated new gTLDs and .brand nTLDs to launch in 2016, expectations are running high among the attendees.