How Search Engines Are Killing Clever URLs

Although investors scrambled--and shelled out up to $185,000 a pop--for the chance to snatch up the new domains and profit as gatekeepers, uptake among end-users has been underwhelming. More than three years after the program's launch, roughly 26 million new generic top-level domains have been registered, compared with the 164 million registered "legacy" top-level domains. Cyrus Namazi, the vice president of domain-name services and industry engagement at ICANN, acknowledged that demand for new top-level domains won't eclipse that for legacies "any time soon." Yet Namazi believes registrations for the new extensions will continue to grow. "We are in the embryonic stages of the expansion," he said.