November 16, 2016

Neustar Director : Domain names may evolve, but they are not going away

Crystal Peterson is the Director Of Registry Services & Global Channel Management at Neustar

WebHosting.info is the official information partner for ‘ResellerClub Presents HostingCon India 2016’ which is being held on the 16th and 17th November. We are bringing updates, news and a number of interviews from key speakers and brands present at the event exclusively for our readers.

Here’s an exclusive interview of one of our key speakers from today’s event, Crystal Peterson. She is the Director Of Registry Services & Global Channel Management at Neustar.

How important is it for businesses to be online?

I think it is very important for businesses to be online and to be found outside your own small neighborhood where your business may be located and in order to get to additional customers and additional business practices.

I think it is important to have a web presence and have a campaign around how you will get people to find you online and to make sure you have email. It is not just about having a domain name with content.


Do you think new gTLDs make it easy for businesses to come online?

I think new gTLDs make it more recognizable that being online is important. With over thousands of TLD options available, I think it makes it more in the spotlight for people to get online.

It’s our job to make sure that we reach small business owners who might have had a business for the past 10-15 years and have never thought that being online was important. I think new gTLDs is a way to reach them.

How does one pitch new gTLDs against the generic TLDs which are already known to people?

That’s a great question! I think through studies, research, looking at certain SEO possibilities, SEO qualities, bringing examples and testimonials to the market for helping people realize that having just a .COM or .ORG or .NET or .IN is not the only path to getting online. It is an important path if they can find the names that they want in that space, although, many times they cannot, then utilizing a new gTLD is an option.

Do you think new gTLDs are suitable for small businesses which are restricted in terms of financial resources?

Absolutely! I think that having a marketing strategy is important for any business whether you are a tiny shop or you are the largest corporation. I think having a marketing strategy for how you are going to reach your customers is important and for those on a tighter budget, that strategy might be a bit tighter but that doesn’t mean that you should do nothing.

New TLDs play a part in that and having a portfolio of TLDs to be able to manage your content is good. On a large budget your portfolio might be hundreds or thousands of domain names. On a very tight budget it might be just one domain name, but it’s still a domain name. It’s about looking at how one can best utilize the name that they choose which might be a new TLD. Domain names are important, it’s not about new TLDs, it’s about domain names in general.

You spoke about the “not-com” revolution, and you have been speaking about it to various audiences. Have you come across any misconceptions that people have with respect to nTLDs and you would like to address?

People think they are going to go away or that they may fail and while there may be some shifting in the market, I don’t think that they are going to go away. We are looking at a lot of different options.
When people thought it was a ‘dot-com’ world, it was still one brand in over 250 options. Today we can see that, ‘dot-com’ is one brand in a 1000 options, so domain names are here to stay. We may evolve or change and figure out new ways to use domain names, but they are not going away.