Nivu Hussain entered the domain industry as an intern in 2013, the year new top level domains began to launch. At CloudFest Americas, the Senior Business Development Manager at Identity Digital talked through what web hosts should know about domain extensions.
His first employer was .Club, one of the early new extensions. He was among its founding employees and spent eight years there, working in marketing and channel, until GoDaddy acquired the company. He now works at Identity Digital, which holds a portfolio of more than 250 extensions and has applied for roughly 260 more in the next round.
His pitch starts with a basic step. Every business needs a name, and the domain is where people begin. For years that meant searching for a keyword plus .com. Hussain gave a hypothetical: miamifrenchbakery.com would be hard to land, but miamifrench.bakery is within reach. He also pointed to .dentist as a way for a practice to get a keyword-rich address that suits search. In his view, keywords and content count for everything now, and AI makes a good keyword name matter even more. A good name also spares customers the misspelled workarounds they once picked when the exact .com was gone.
For hosting companies that want to carry these extensions, Hussain described two routes. A company can get its own ICANN accreditation, or it can work with a registrar such as GoDaddy or name.com that offers a white label reseller setup. He sees it as a matter of keeping the customer. “Nobody comes to buy hosting first,” he said, so a host that cannot offer the right domain risks sending the customer elsewhere.
Hussain also wanted to show that the extensions see real use. He pointed to a Spider-Man film campaign using a .movie address and to MrBeast selling through a .store domain. A company does not have to run everything from its main domain, he said. Email, a special program or a new product can live on a separate name, and some companies try this internally too. Hosts can do the same in their own marketing, he added, not only offer it to clients.
