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By Ron Jackson
On
our first day at ADN
- July 4, 2021 - the
biggest .US related news I know about is our own
birth! I felt nothing could be more fitting than having Independence
Day as the launch date for American Domain Names.
This site is the long overdue repayment of a debt
that I always felt I owed .US.
The domain
industry has been very good to me since I entered it
back in the spring of 2002. While my domain business revenues have
come from multiple sources (especially the domain industry
trade magazine Domain Name Journal that I
founded at DNJournal.com
on New Year's Day in 2003), I never would have found this
business in the first place were it not for .US! You can
read all of the details about that in "My .US
Story", the first entry in our Profiles
section.
The short
version is that I was looking for a new business to get
into when I stumbled upon on a magazine ad for .US in April
2002 |
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announcing the TLD had just been
opened up to all
American citizens and others who do business in America
(it had
previously been reserved for government and other special
uses). I thought that was intriguing since I had already
found it difficult to find a .com domain I wanted for my
previous business.
In the
course of looking further into .US, I discovered a domain
forum and was astonished to learn that people were making
money buying and selling domain names. I never thought of
the domain name itself as having a lot of value, assuming
that could only come from whatever you built on the domain.
It was a revelation that sent me off in many new directions,
including building a domain portfolio of more than 7,000
domains at its peak (concentrating on .com, .org and .us),
starting DNJournal, traveling all over the world to cover
and speak at domain conferences and meeting many hundreds of
amazing people along the way.
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As
time passed, I kept thinking one day I
should do something to pay .US back for the introduction
it gave me to
the world I have so happily lived for the past 20 years. I have always
felt that .US, as the official domain extension of a nation that
is a global power and has the world's greatest economy, has been
greatly under utilized and under appreciated. The fact that
it wasn't open to all until years after .com was already
established as the world's dominant extension didn't help,
but that doesn't change the inherent value of what
.US represents. Many other ccTLDs (country code domains)
around |
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the
world are booming right now and .US should
have been (and still can be) a bigger
part of that story. |
While I have
had a popular platform at DNJournal, it is a publication for the
entire domain industry and, as a career journalist, I never
wanted to put my own interests above the responsibility to
serve everyone as equally as possible. As a result, .US likely got much less
coverage at DNJ than it would have if someone else had been
the owner. With its much narrower scope, ADN, one of the few
publications devoted to a single domain extension, will
never be as big of a publication or business as DNJ has
been, but that's OK with me. It will be a labor or love and
payback for the rewards I've already gotten from walking
through a door that .US opened for me.
Now what
can you do? If you are part of or have an interest in
.US and its community of users, you can send in
information for our reporting. Tell us about your own
experiences as a .US buyer, seller or developer. Let is know
about .US sales that can be publicized, registrars that are
offering great prices (one my favorites, Dynadot.com,
has $1.99 registrations as I write this), interesting .US
websites you know about or have seen in the wild (a .US TLD
on a commercial vehicle is always a cool photo to get). With
your help we can put together a valuable resource that
can also be used to give potential buyers a lot of
good reasons to consider America's official domain for their
next project.
In
the weeks and months ahead, I'm looking forward to filling this column
with all kinds of .US News & Views while also doing some longer
feature stories on key people and companies for our .US
Profiles section. In the meantime, thank you for
stopping by and Happy 4th of July! I hope
you'll tell others about us and come back often!
Posted
July 4, 2021. Permalink for this story:
https://www.adn.us/news-views/2021/0704.htm
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