Menius Enterprises acquired the domain name Methadone.US some months ago. I have been developing the domain into a methadone treatment information site using the DevHub website builder.

Chemical dependency is a prevalent illness in American society and many of us have encountered it in one form or another, either directly or indirectly. Methadone is a very specific medication-assisted treatment approach used to help those suffering with an opiate dependency.

In recent years, methadone treatment clinics have steadily emerged across the USA as more individuals found themselves trying to cope with opiate withdrawal and the disruption to their lives that addiction brings. Methadone.US aims to reduce the stigma associated with methadone and to provide some basic information on the many benefits of methadone treatment programs.

The Methadone.US domain name is an ideal generic web address particularly for U.S. based residents, families, professionals, and treatment centers. As is typically the case, the time required to develop a comprehensive web portal is hard work. Writing and refining custom content (carefully screened for accuracy and relevance) can become very time consuming. But the effort is worthwhile when the end product provides a valuable service.

Taking a great domain and constructing something of value on that domain (where nothing existed previously) is a gratifying endeavor. Content generation is more art than science and is best approached with a quality, over quantity, focus. This has been a chief consideration in the authoring of Methadone.US.

The site is still under construction, but is taking a definite shape and form. It will eventually be monetized through paid directory listings and direct advertising. But for now is incorporating Google adsense feeds, many of which are an excellent match to the content provided on the website. In terms of easy access and the marketing of a new site, starting with a logical, premium domain name is always a big help.

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The Neustar registry has created a new logo for the .US web address. The new logo contains a fitting new tagline too, “America’s Address“. The .US domain name space currently enjoys just over 1.76 million total registrations, most of which originated with U.S. businesses or U.S. citizens due to the necessity of meeting nexus requirements for United States residency or U.S. incorporation.

.US remains one of the premier web spaces for United States focused websites. While obviously appropriate for American companies & businesses, .US is often identified by foreign internet users as a default web address for the U.S. due to the popularity of two letter country codes in other parts of the world such as .cn for China or .ca for Canada.

A key selling feature of .US is its instant familiarity to American internet users, its uniquely American identity, and the ability to utilize a high-quality .US domain name as opposed to settling for an awkwardly long .com domain name alternative (see graphic above).

The dotUS logo change is good timing going into 2011, and would appear to follow the recent logic that dictated the .BIZ logo redesign and associated tagline “Better Name. Better Results.”

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PremiumDomains.biz usually write about high demand generic domain names since these are the stock-in-trade of the domain industry, command the highest prices, and they also fuel a good portion of internet commerce.

However, there exist creative and fanciful domain names which are so “catchy” that they can take on a unique life of their own, such as Yahoo or Google. I recently ran across a website for a company that provides online personalized greeting cards. Their name is MoonPig! I had to laugh as the name caught me so off guard. I repeated it to myself several times and it stuck.

MoonPig’s official site is located at MoonPig.com. The company are a UK-based outfit who opened a branch in Australia in 2004. They have a hi-tech production facility located in New Jersey, USA. Moonpig.com allow users to fill out greeting cards online with a personal message or caption, and the card is then mailed directly to the recipient.

The company have a standard sized card which costs $3.99 and a large card which runs $7.99. There are many cute greeting cards to select from on their site and a number of neat mock-ups in which you can embed your friend’s face on the cover of a magazine or some other comical picture.

Catchy domain names can be successfully branded in the marketplace. While they may not receive natural direct navigation traffic or describe the product being sold, they can become synonymous with a product such that the consumer instantly knows what is being offered. Like McDonald’s with hamburgers, Zappos with shoes, UFC with martial arts events, or GoDaddy with domain name registration.

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Hotel domain names are a specialty niche in the domain name market. There are generic super premiums like Hotels.com and there are other pure geo-targeted domain names like MiamiHotels.biz.

Hotels.eu sold via Sedo in 2006 for $329,509 and exemplifies the high value attached to the “hotels” keyword in the domain name sales industry. SydneyHotels.com was acquired earlier this year for $100,000 while hotel portal redirects such as HotelPortal.co.uk fetched $8092 in 2009.

Online hotel reservations were one of the earliest and most successful business models available on the internet with many hotel affiliate programs springing up in the budding years of the web.

Hoovers reports that there are approximately 50,000 hotel & motel lodging facilities in the United States. Collectively, they bring in an estimated $120 billion dollars per year. Marriott, Hilton, Holiday Inn, and Hampton are but a few of the well-known hotel brands in America and abroad.

Geo-targeted hotel domains that contain the name of a city act as a regional portal that can list all of the hotels in operation for a particular destination. Huge metropolitan areas like New York City, Miami, and Los Angeles can provide tens of thousands of available hotel rooms. So, online comparative price checking is a recommended method for beginning one’s travel plans.

Pure geo-targeted domain names in the hotel category qualify as premium domains since they represent superior marketing attributes and are so easily communicated to consumers in writing and in oral communication. To browse premium hotel domains available in the domain aftermarket, visit PremiumDomains.US.

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The culinary arts are of interest to many people. And this phenomenon seems to be catching on across the nation. Culinary art schools enjoy full enrollment as students, professionals, and everyday folks indulge their senses and learn the fine art of preparing delicious meals.

Culinary is the general food industry term used for those things related to cooking or the kitchen. It has been refined somewhat to refer more specifically to the art of cooking. The industry itself has exploded in popularity with television food programs enjoying high ratings and artisan chefs becoming a household name while enjoying their own successful lines of cookware. Think Emeril!

Established websites like Culinary.net offer a wide variety of online recipes while domain names like Culinary.biz will eventually become the portal for an entire industry of culinary arts, culinary products, culinary schools, restauranteers, and aspiring students.

Generic domain names of course make excellent business launchers. They also excel as marketing tools since the general public instantly recognize them and often type them directly into the internet browser address field. Food domain names are fairly specific and have certainly attracted attention within the domain name industry. Domain name pioneer, Rick Schwartz, sold Candy.com in a multiimillion dollar deal only 2 years ago.

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The ubiquitous publication of many decades has launched its sexy array of beauties via Playboy.TV. Playboy’s evolution through time found them typically on the cutting edge of technology. They moved from a very successful hardcopy magazine (founded in 1953) to having success in both the satellite and videotape markets before finally moving to the internet.

It appears that Playboy are now positioning themselves for the next big step in internet advancement. That would be the condensing of media & communications signals into a single digital portal coming into the home or business. This will be a huge game changer and will become the equivalent of a nuclear war between countries. Except the war will be waged between large media conglomerates each vying to become your TV-phone-internet provider of choice.

There was a time when a family would subscribe to a hardline phone service (like AT&T), have dial-up internet, and maybe a separate cable company running a line into the house for cable television. Anyone with a home-based business might also have a separate phone service on top of all that. Times have changed though. For example, I know obtain all these services through one company, Time Warner. Multiple digital signals, multiple products, packaged as one service, and with only one bill. This is the future.

Playboy acquiring Playboy.TV is possibly one of the best moves they have made in recent times. .TV is the single best media web address on the internet for obvious reasons. To fully appreciate this move one must understand that web addresses will be the “channels” on that all encompassing single digital portal coming into your home.

In other words, Playboy.TV may well become the worldwide channel for their brand, and subscribers will pay for the channel à la carte. Imagine ordering your complete TV lineup direct from TV networks and programmers thus bypassing the traditional cable companies completely. The big winner here is the single portal digital access provider who will be bringing internet into your home and to all of your mobile internet devices. That is the holy grail of future media. And .TV may likely be at the very center of it all.

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The single best indicator of a top level domain’s growth is the sheer number of domain registrations and the conversion of those registered domain names into developed websites. After widespread proliferation of the com/net/org domain extensions in the 1990′s came the market introduction of dotINFO, dotBIZ, and dotUS in the early 2000′s.

These were labeled the “new domains” to connote their relative newness to the well-established com/net/org trio that rose to prominence with the internet’s global adoption. Afilias, who manage the .info web address, just released their annual dotINFO report for 2010.

The report highlights very substantial growth for the .info web address for year 2010. The domain space grew 30% in 2010 pushing total registrations for .info to over 6.8 million. DomainTools‘ report of current internet domain registration numbers puts .info at over 7.3 million as of 12/7/2010.

The Afilias annual study announced that dotINFO currently ranks # 7 among 270 top level domains available worldwide. dotINFO has over 1.3 million live, active websites available to internet users at the present time. 

Also continuing along the same path as .info are the .biz (business) and .US (United States) web addresses each of which have continued to increase their global registration numbers and be readily adopted by local, regional, national and global companies.

To browse premium quality .info domain names, visit: PremiumDomains.US

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Like every other industry, the domain name market has its own unique words and phrases that carry a commonly understood meaning among its patrons.

Some of the domain terms derive from other well known business sectors like finance and real estate. Recently addressed here was the frequent overuse of the term premium domains. Below are some other domain catch phrases with a short definition (or description) of what they mean.

• domain name portfolio (a collection of domain names being held or utilized as a financial investment, or active business)
• domain name collection (generally carries the same connotation as domain name portfolio)
• domain investor (anyone who acquires domain names for investment purposes)
• domainer (similar to domain investor but broader to also include domain enthusiasts)
• premium domain (a rare, top quality domain name that commands higher prices due to its superior characteristics)
• generic domain name (typically a one to three word category defining web address like travel, dogs, sports cars, rock music)
• geo domain or geodomain (a pure city, state, country, or location web address such as Detroit, California, Canada, Niagra Falls)
• geo-targeted domains (refer to the combination of a geographical location paired with a generic word such as Boston+Hotels)
• domain parking (pointing a domain name to a search results landing page that contains revenue generating clickable ads)
• domain monetization (general phrase to describe any means by which a domain name is used to generate income)
• domain marketplace (an online brokerage or warehouse of domain names for sale or for lease)
• domain auction (a live in-person event or online auction interface in which participants bid against each other to buy domain names for sale)
• domain name broker (similar to a real estate broker in that the individual sells or buys domains on behalf of a client, and/or facilitates domain name transactions)
• luxury domains (similar in definition to premium domains and suggestive of high quality and high value web addresses)

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