A couple of us will be heading over to Brussels on Monday to attend both the CENTR Registrar Day and the CENTR Awards.

CENTR is an interesting organisation, as it brings together most of the European domain registries under one roof. As a domain registrar we do business with a growing number of domain registries around the world, so being able to meet with several of them at one time is always helpful and can be quite productive.

I’ve also been invited to speak on a panel during the Registrar Day entitled “Changing market conditions: fluctuating growth and new challenges”. The panel is being moderated by Giovanni Seppia (EURid) and will include myself and Marianna Siouti (Papaki, EPE) and Jimmie Eriksson (Loopia).

What are we going to talk about? Considering the event and the audience the obvious focus is on domain names and what’s going on in Europe:

Four years on, the new gTLDs have reached a global TLD market share of 7%. How have they been faring in Europe and how are they being used? Will ccTLDs maintain their strong link to national identity? This panel will explore the constantly evolving European market of top-level domains, including lessons from the Geo TLDs, registrar growth expectations and consumer behaviour post-2013.

Hopefully we’ll be able to have a fairly vibrant discussion.

From our commercial perspective new TLDs haven’t been exactly a resounding success. Uptake on them is still very low and the ROI is slow. We currently offer hundreds of top level domains that cover many verticals, languages and interests. However a lot of the registries are setting their wholesale prices very high compared to better established domain extensions. I can understand and sympathise with the registry operators who have invested significantly in bringing these domains to market, but it can make for a “hard sell” at times.

Personally, however, I really like some of the choices I can now make when I go to register a domain.

Our own online properties reflect the new choices.

Want to find our blog? It’s under blacknight.blog.

Need updates from our technical team? Head over to blacknight.tech.

Want us to hire you? Then you can check out blacknight.careers.

Want our press releases and media mentions? There’s blacknight.press.

While that is a lot of different domain names there is a logic to them.

Why bury content deep in your website when you can use a domain to send people directly to the content they’re looking for? Check out blacknight.cloud to see what I mean.

Oh and if you want to get yourself a nice new shiny domain name (and maybe some hosting to make it useful) then head on over to blacknight.market!

 

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