A Brand TLD is very similar to a gTLD except it is not offered to the general public. A major benefit in having a Brand TLD is to have 100% control of your domain. It provides greater protection for your brand because no one else can get that domain. When more companies switch to brand based TLDs it will create a higher sense of trust for non .COM domains. As of right now, a lot of companies are still using .COM, so having your own TLD is a great way to set yourself apart from the competition. Anyone can have a generic.com, but owning something like home.yourbrand will make your domain feel special.

Another major benefit of having a Brand TLD is controlling who is allow to use your domain. You can create partnerships and affiliate programs by having partnerfirm.yourbrand as a way to build a connection between the two companies. This will also ensure that your customers are going to the right place for an additional feel of security.

Major companies that have acquired their own Brand TLDs are:

• Barclays switched to home.Barclays
• Canon switched to global.Canon
• Saxo switched to home.Saxo
• Google owns registry.google
• BMW owns the .bmw extension

The cost of registering a brand TLD is $185,000, but there are support programs that will help lower the cost from $185,000 to $47,000. This is still a substantial cost for newer companies so it still seems to be geared toward companies with a lot of disposable income. The window for new gTLD is currently closed and it is not an easy process to apply for your own brand TLD. The process will go through an application review, then there might be a dispute resolution and other process highlight in this chart.

You can visit the ICANN website here.

How do know the domain you are developing is the best opportunity? This is the first question that comes up when you decide to develop a domain. You may have hundreds or thousands of domains in your portfolio, so how do you know which one is the best to develop. If you are going to be spending time and money on website development and marketing, you want to make sure you are choosing the right domain for your investment. 

Hopefully you are at least parking your domains. Perhaps you are noticing a few of them are generating more income than others. We have written an article about domain parking here. Parking is a good way to discover how much traffic and revenue you can get with a new domain before development. Not knowing traffic levels is one of the common mistake novices domainers make when selling domains.

Other than parking, you can use a service that offers instant domain development. Instant domain development is a method of developing hundreds of domains as quickly and as cost effective as parking. 

Things you should consider before developing the domain name:

• How much traffic does the domain receive?
• What audience makes up that traffic? Is it existing traffic or type in traffic? Will people take action based on the name? Backlink traffic from an existing site?
• What is the effective value on the audience? Is it healthcare audience with high CPC or general audience with a lower CPC.
• What is the RPM(Revenue per thousand) per page?
• Using keyword cost estimation and volume tools as the Google Keyword Planner Tool to determine which keywords will generate higher CPC and Traffic.

Using our tool, we have seen cases of developed websites with more general audience make less revenue per month than a high CPC instantly developed domain with a high revenue audience.

The amount of traffic, the quality of the traffic, the geolocation of the audience, and active audience is what you should focus your time and money on first. ToughDomains allows users to instantly develop hundreds of domains in minutes and start receiving traffic and referral data on those names. Before you spend any time or money, make sure you have all the insight data to choose the right name to develop.