Holy Crap! It’s a real live actual .pro domain!

I think I would have an easier time believing it if I had just seen a UFO or sasquatch, but today I actually saw a real live .PRO domain in the real world. It was weird, you know that feeling you get when your eyes are plainly relaying information to your brain but your mind has extreme difficulty parsing it. It was like “WTF is that?” Being in the business over 15 years, I have an eye for domain names that is probably way past compulsive. Over the course of my day I routinely observe, make note of, memorize and lookup dozens of domains. When it comes to domain names very little goes unnoticed to me, so believe me when I tell you this:

It was the first .pro domain name I’ve seen in actual use out in the real world – ever.

Just to check my perspective, I took a look at our database at easyDNS, where we have about 130,000 domains under management. Not one of them is a .pro domain. By way of contrast, we have about a half dozen .bi domains from Burundi and even a couple .aq domainsfrom Antarctica (I’m not kidding).

Why Do I Mention All This?

Because I think .pro is a great example of how TLD’s will for the most part fail as ostensible category verticals. Granted, a lot of the problems with .pro stemmed from poor execution. The initial launch: as a sponsored TLD under given second level’s did not fly. But even that makes a case that doesn’t bode well for category TLDs.