Telnic Limited, the registry operator for the new communications-focused .tel top level domain (TLD), today (Aug. 13) announced it’ll be delivering a new solution for text-based advertising listings for the .tel domain.
The objective is to enable .tel domain owners to use more traditional and measurable domain monetization techniques.
Telnic informed in March that registrations from businesses and individuals worldwide had gone past 100,000 in just 36 hours after its general availability opened.
It also said that new registrations continue to flood into Telnic, as leading social network MySpace began to sell to its customers and global communications company BT started to sell .tel domains from May of this year, initially through BT Tradespace.
“Whilst .tel domains provide new ways of generating revenue through the support and optimization of premium rate telephone numbers, software downloads, ringtones, and competition-based formats, we recognized that those used to traditional monetization methods still felt somewhat restricted,” said Henri Asseily, CTO and chief strategist at Telnic.
“We have therefore enabled .tel owners to include clearly identifiable, text-based sponsored advertising links. In this way, we maintain the clear purpose of a .tel domain as a single point of contact whilst also meeting the requirements for monetization across all internet-enabled devices.”
The solution has been to introduce a special sub-type of a text (TXT) record with a ‘.tad’ suffix. This is stored in a special folder within the .tel domain.
This record contains the title, label, description, and URI to use in the advertisement, as well as display settings which enable the domain owner to position the advert in their chosen place on the page (top, bottom, or right) when the content is delivered to the proxy page.
When the proxy loads a .tel domain, it checks the format and settings of the adverts and displays them accordingly.
Wow, I love this new concept of .tel domains. The best thing is that you can CALL a .tel like any other phone number. Tel domains are just the next logical step in developement!
I have over 100 premium .tel’s and although I don’t call myself a domainer, I can see huge potential in this domain for communications. Quite simply, with the adoption of mobile internet becoming mainstream now, .tel serves to replace long boring and forgetful numbers, with words (just like .com did for long ip numbers). For business especially, .tel will be a great and memorable way for customers to remember numbers- you simply type in the domain ending in .tel and then click on a number to initiate a call. Can also be updated by the owner of the .tel if they relocate etc. Did I mention it also stores all your other points of contact like twitter, facebook etc… .tel will have a bright future I think.