The more I think about .TRAVEL, the more I think it would make a very interesting business case study...probably for what not to do at launch. This is a domain that really could have benefited by the domainer community. Had they allowed entrepreneurial registrants to come in and build aggregation/portal businesses on various .travel names, they could have built out the TLD quickly. There's a fair amount of money to be made on travel-related affiliate marketing, and the PPC value of travel is reasonably high also. Domainers would have had a powerful incentive to build travel-related businesses around generic .travel names. Certified, authenticated travel businesses were never going to be the first-movers in this TLD (a fact clear only in hindsight, perhaps), yet the typical first-movers with the knowledge and capital to build it out were excluded from participation.

If I were Tralliance, I'd call the last few years the longest sunrise period for a new TLD launch in history, and I'd petition ICANN to allow me to open up TRAVEL to anyone who wants to operate a travel Internet-based service.

From the ever vigilant Edward Hasbrouck comes news that Tralliance parent company TheGlobe.com is planning to sell Tralliance and its .TRAVEL top-level domain registry. I don't think this poses any overarching ICANN policy issues -- you can sell a company and keep its current bundle of contractual relationships intact -- but I do wonder about the business decision.

This is interesting to me because I don't understand why TheGlobe thinks this is not a good business. As of the October 2007 Registry Report to ICANN, .TRAVEL has 28,529 names under management, with 26 different registrars. They resell for about $99. (I can't find the registry level fee anywhere. Anyone else?) I suppose I don't understand why you can't turn a fair profit on that number of names * the registry fee. Granted, this is not .COM, or even .INFO, so it may not have met expectations, but businesses with annual revenue of a few million dollars a year are the backbone of the U.S. economy. It seems to me that you could easily net $500K/year on your current business with upside for future growth, and I don't know that TheGlobe's other business lines, whatever they are, are turning much of a profit at all.