Alex Mayyasi wrote a piece on the new gtlds for Priceonomics, in that piece Richard Tindal COO of Donuts responded to critics with the following:

 “Dot com is not human intuitive,” he tells us. “All it really says is that you’re online, like the www that no one uses anymore. It’s a vestigial thing from the past.” He encourages us to compare the name of an early customer, Republic Bike, as a dot com versus with a new gTLD:

republicbike.com

republic.bike

“See how much faster you understand what the second one does?” he asks. “Over time, technology moves toward being more natural and human.” Tindal says that most buyers of Donuts domain names are small to medium businesses looking for a memorable web presence. “Our business play doesn’t seek to convert major websites because there is a lot of friction,” he explains.

Can we honestly say .com is not intuitive ? Many non tech oriented users online just add .com when you mention a website. They never fill it in with anything else.

It remains to be seen if the average user will come to embrace the new gtlds and find them more intuitive. It is a big world so certainly some will. Will it be big enough to make registries on going successful ventures ? That is the most important question that needs to be answered.

Tindal goes on in the article to say that claims of previous launch failures are news to him.

Tindal used to run a registry responsible for .biz and .US, and he says that the domains introduced in the early 2000s “are strong, profitable businesses, with renewal rates sometimes higher than .com.”

The whole article is a very good read and it is not just focused on Donuts.

Read the full article here