A new work-focused Internet domain — .career — will join the eight-year-old .jobs address next year.
The .career extension is among hundreds of new generic top-level domains (extensions similar to .com, .net, etc.) that will become available in the coming months. Weekly now, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is rolling out approvals for all sorts of extensions. Among the dozens already given the OK are .NYC, .Mormon, .party, .menu, and .singles.
Career is assigned to dotCareer, LLC., which is part of the same group that administers the .jobs domain. That address, managed by Employ Media, has been highly controversial almost since its inception, and was the subject of an ICANN investigation and a termination notice, later resolved. (Details are here.)
An alternative to the .jobs domain, .career is available to anyone. Restrictions limit who can apply for a .jobs address and how it can be used.
A dramatic explosion of Internet extensions
According to its application for the new extension, dotCareer foresees .careers offering more choices for consumers and “to further provide marketing opportunities and domain names for registrants to promote and provide career, job, human resources, and employment-related information.”
More specifically, the announcement of the new extension suggests,
Businesses and staffing agencies around the world will find .CAREER a natural extension for outward communications and marketing of their products and services, such as www.salary.career and www.NewYorkjobs.career. Individuals will be able to register their own name in .CAREER such as www.bobsmith.career for self-promotion to recruiters.”
In that announcement, Tom Embrescia, chairman of Second Generation, the family investment fund that owns dotCareer, likened the new Internet extensions to the dramatic explosion in radio and television channels.
“The natural evolution of the Internet is for website operators to narrowcast content to a targeted audience. New extensions like .CAREER will be a big part of this in the years ahead,” he said.
While registrations and use of the new extensions won’t begin until next year, many registrars are now accepting reservations. Several, including Your.career and My.career are already on a reservation list.
Prices for .career addresses expected to be competitive
The cost of obtaining a .career address is likely to be competitive with the more traditional .com extensions. Prices haven’t yet been announced by the individual registrars (dotCareer is the supplier; registrars like GoDaddy are the retailers); however, because so many new names will available, the cost could be only a few dollars a year. A .jobs address runs more than $100 annually.
In the application, dotCareer noted it, “intends to consider the potential of the use of a first-come, first-serve (at a higher fixed annual fee) basis to determine string allocation in appropriate circumstances, such as in allocating any premium names.”
The .jobs extension, developed, and administered by Employ Media in a partnership with the Society for Human Resource Management. It was envisioned as a way for employers to promote their open positions and as a way to make it easy for job seekers to find a company’s jobs.
When Employ Media began allowing job boards to start using the .jobs extension, it faced disciplinary action by ICANN, which eventually threatened to cancel its agreement and end Employ Media’s stewardship of the domain. The dispute went so far as to the start of an international arbitration, when ICANN dropped the matter and allowed job boards to use the .jobs address.
As of the latest report on file with ICANN, 44,187 .jobs addresses were in use worldwide in June. Most of them are being used by DirectEmployers Association, the group that triggered ICANN’s investigation when it first began using the .jobs extension for its job board services.