Marketing campaign aims to boost lagging Dot Vegas registration

By Daniel Rothberg

Monday, July 20, 2015 | 2 a.m.

What is .vegas?

That is not a question you want to hear if you are Tyson MacKay, director of marketing for Dot Vegas, Inc., and you’re trying to persuade a business to buy a .vegas domain for its website.

But it’s one MacKay has fielded more than once since the domain launched in September — and it’s central to the problem alternative domains such as .vegas face in a .com-dominant World Wide Web.

“They didn’t understand it or they hadn’t heard of it,” MacKay said.

What .vegas does is fairly simple. It allows users to register websites with the .vegas domain rather than the more traditional .com, .org. or .net. A .vegas website can redirect to a .com home page — if you, for instance, visit treasureisland.vegas, it forwards to treasureisland.com — or stand alone to replace a .com, as electronic.vegas does.

The .vegas root joins a handful of specialized city domains, including .nyc, .london, .berlin, .paris, .moscow., and .tokyo.

Although they won’t replace .com, .net or .org anytime soon, the domains have had some success in getting websites to register. For example, about 152,000 websites have registered with .berlin, 80,000 with .nyc and 64,000 with .london, according to nTLDStats, a website that tracks top-level domain registration.

By comparison, of the 284 million domain name registrations filed as of September 2014, 114.9 million ended in .com, according to Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief.

With registrations hovering around 15,000, .vegas is lagging.

But MacKay says the numbers don’t consider domains given away for free or the city’s population. After all, the Las Vegas Valley is home to about 2 million people, whereas Berlin has a population of 3.4 million and New York City, 8.5 million.

Plus, MacKay said, the city of New York, which manages .nyc, has taken an active role in pushing the domain to businesses. He said the city of Las Vegas, which makes 10 percent off each .vegas sale, also will begin raising awareness and offering deals to companies that buy .vegas sites.

Dot Vegas, Inc. plans to launch a six-month television campaign in August to raise awareness about the domain. MacKay said consumers need to encounter the .vegas domain “out in the wild,” hearing it mentioned on the radio or seeing it spelled out on billboards.

But it’s difficult to tell whether a more concerted push will raise enthusiasm.

At least one local consultant, Platinum Web Marketing founder Anthony Carlitto, believes the .vegas domain is a bad bet and doesn’t advise his clients to buy a .vegas domain. Not only are alternative domains unfamiliar to the public, he said, they do nothing to improve a website’s ranking in a Google search.

“I don’t see any way for it to be valuable,” Carlitto said. “I knew about them coming out a long time ago. I’ll take a .com over a .vegas, and I’ve been out in Vegas for 36 years.”

MacKay admits it is too early to tell if alternative domains such as .vegas will affect search results. But he said the domains still are valuable for marketing, especially if there is a shift away from .com, as he predicts there might be if top-level domains take off.

Michael Kruse, a real estate agent at Keller Williams, can attest to the value of a .vegas website. He said traffic to his site is up about 30 percent since he bought lvrealestate.vegas to replace his clunkier .com name, lasvegashomesbymike.com.

“I’m happy I got it when I did,” Kruse said. “I think over time it’s really going to catch on.”

Las Vegas officials also see the domain as a benefit. It is used for branding initiatives — downtown.vegas, for instance, helps promote the developing downtown area.

Even for cities, though, alternative domains have limits. Web users typically look for .org, .edu or .gov sites they know are credible.

“With issues of identity theft today, it’s very important that people know they are on a legitimate government site,” city spokesman David Riggleman said. “We don’t use the top-level domain for the official site.”

Of the 15,000 .vegas websites purchased, about 80 percent of registrants are in the Las Vegas area.

Not all .vegas domain purchasers, though, have motives related to marketing or commerce.

Danny Ballard, who runs Fat Beard LLC, a web development firm, encourages clients to claim .vegas domains to protect their brand names from cybersquatters. And some larger companies have registered .vegas domain names. Google, for example, is the registered owner of google.vegas, and software company Atari Inc. is the owner of atari.vegas.

There also is a speculative element to buying .vegas domains, which start at GoDaddy for $29.99. Some users buy names they believe might go up in value.

“It’s real estate,” said Michael Gallagher, a New Yorker who owns jebbushforpresident.vegas and has purchased website names about politics as a sideline business. “It might be crappy real estate. It might be great real estate.”