WordPress Reveals .Blog Domain to Roll Out Later This Year
Have you ever wanted a different domain extension that would set you a part from the rest of the bloggers in the universe? Well, now here’s your chance. WordPress.com, the popular website hosting service, announced recently that .blog domain extensions will be available for users later in the year.
“Just like .com before it, .blog is clear and accessible, and it creates millions of fresh, new options for naming your blog,” WordPress.com said Thursday in an online statement.
The new domain will be up for anyone who wants it, and anyone interested can sign up to get notified once it is ready for the public. Later on in their statement, they explain why .blog was the next option.
“For years, .com was the dominant choice for website names, but it’s become increasingly difficult to find a name. With a top-level domain like .blog, you can get a name that truly matches your identity. Plus, you’ll get all the same benefits with Google search results.”
WordPress.com wants to offer this extension to “all websites” and users will not need a WordPress or WordPress.com site in order to buy the domain extension.
The parent company of WordPress.com, Automattic, secured the rights to the domain which people will be able to purchase at WordPress.com or through their partner domain name registrars.
At the moment, the registration prices for the domain extension are still being finalized, but the company said that it will be “in the standard range for new top-level domains with some premium pricing for higher-value names.”
The founder of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg wrote on his own blog about the acquisition had been a plan in the works for a while.
“It’s now public that Automattic is the company behind Knock Knock Whois There LLC, the registry for the new .blog TLD. (And a great pun.) We wanted to stay stealth while in the bidding process and afterward in order not to draw too much attention, but nonetheless the cost of the .blog auction got up there (people are estimating around $20M). I’m excited we won and think that it will be both an amazing business going forward and give lots of folks an opportunity to have a fantastic domain name in a new namespace and with an easy-to-say TLD,” he wrote.
So who is ready for “insertyournamehere.blog?” Won’t that be a game changer?
(Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)