18(a) Describe the mission/purpose of your proposed gTLD

Prototypical answer:

gTLDFull Legal NameE-mail suffixDetail
.guideTop Level Domain Holdings Limitedgmail.comView

OVERVIEW
A significant number of websites aim to provide editorial content on products, travel destinations, services, software, apps and other offerings. The introduction of a “.GUIDE” top level domain will provide these sites more meaningful domain names and assure that these sites are clearly identifiable within search results.

As the amount of pages on the web increases, and as more and more companies try to sell goods and services online, guide sites are becoming more and more necessary and appreciated. The overarching goal for the .GUIDE top-level domain is to attract organizations, small and large businesses, entrepreneurs and any other persons or entities interested in representing their websites under this moniker.


GUIDE STATISTICS AND INFORMATION
The most famous of all online guides, Yahoo!, began as a student hobby at Stanford University in 1994 and rapidly grew to become the largest site on the Internet by 1999. Yahoo originally intended to categorize the entire Internet--now however, the amount of content online is so large that specialized guides exist for every sub-genre of category, such as guides for mobile apps--or even specific types of mobile apps, such as mobile games.

The word “guide” appears in Google search results 3.2 Billion times, roughly on par with the word “sex”. Within .com, .net and .org, the word occurs 225,000 times, just 20% less than sites containing the term “sex”. Both of these observations point to the fact that there are many natural uses for the word guide within the domain name system.

The Google term “hotel guide” alone has 587 Million hits, and indeed there are tens of thousands of online hotel guides, possibly more than there are hotels. Other forms of travel guides include guides by destination (city or state name) by type of travel activity (scuba, backpacking, kayaking etc.) or guides of a historical nature (guide to medieval Europe, ancient rome etc.).

Technical website and web app guides are also very popular. With over 500,000 apps on the iPhone and Android platforms, app discovery is a significant problem and sites such as AppCraver.com and AppsFire.com are active in guiding people through this ocean of content.

Film guides such movieguide.org and classicfilmguide.com are also extremely popular, and could benefit from more meaningful domain names (MOVIES.GUIDE, CLASSICFILMS.GUIDE) for example. Music guides are also quite popular, with sites like atlantamusicguide.com specialized in local music for specific cities and venues, and for specific musical genres.

MISSION & PURPOSE
Despite the advancements and breakthroughs of search technology, humans still enjoy curated of websites and products by other humans. Whether the subject is fashion, food, hotels, or iPhone apps, there is a large appetite for websites that guide and inform the user.

Because the current popularity and usefulness of these “guide sites”, and because of the potential for more meaningful top level domains, we strongly believe that the .GUIDE top-level domain will be used by people and businesses providing guides.

Similar gTLD applications: (0)

gTLDFull Legal NameE-mail suffixzDetail