Barclays ditches dot com in favour of proprietary domains

Seems a surprising move to me. People are very familiar with .com and trust it. In the short-term I suspect people will be (rightly) wary of these new, unfamiliar domains. It will be interesting to see if lots of big companies follow Barclays' example.

In total 619 brands applied for a brand regsitry including .Apple .Google .IBM .Nike .BMW .Toyota .Chase .HSBC .Hilton .Marriott etc. BNPParibas, the 11th ranked global banking brand, also launched a new site on its brand registry LivingTheChange.BNPParibas. .COM isn't going away anytime soon but the brand registries allow financial institutions and online retailers to operate at a deeper level of security because no one else can register a .Barclays domain but Barclays. Anyone could register barclaysbanking.com as an example for nefarious activities.

Exciting times in dot brand land. This is a really interesting development and the first real bet on a dot brand extension. AXA did put up a page in March 2014 on .axa, Marriott has announced that they will use .marriott for their affiliates, however Barclays seem to be the first to go all-in. Rumours have it that .bmw is up next.

Surely the natural reaction from internet users are: "Why a new extension, when everyone is used to .com and co.uk?". Are you aware how much phishing costs banks? For a bank it's increasingly important to secure a safe haven for its users. They can do that with a .barclays. Secondly, branding wise the timing looks very good. They signal that they are different than others and will get a lot more exposure, than if they were brand no. 400 to launch a dot brand. And there will be hundreds more dot brands coming out. There are too many strong players betting on dot brand for it to fail.