How to Get Your Own Top Level Domain - New Book from Joe Alagna & Andrey Insarov Will Help You Prepare For the Next Round of New TLDs

Earlier today I posted an article about the .ART registry celebrating their 8th anniversary this week. They are one of the more successful new top level domains to come out of ICANN's first wave of new gTLDs that brought hundreds of new extensions to the Internet. Now ICANN is preparing to launch the second wave of new gTLDs in 2026 and a lot of people will be vying to own a top level domain of their own. As attractive as that prospect appears on the surface, creating a successful new TLD is a lot more difficult than most people might imagine.

In the article about .ART we focused on what the founders did after winning their  TLD to attract hundreds of thousands of loyal supporters. Thanks to a new book, How to Get Your Own Top Level Domain, that has just been released by industry veterans Joe Alagna and Andrey Insarov, you can learn what has to be done before you can take the reins of your own new domain registry.

Joe Alagna (CSO, it.com Domains) and Andrey Insarov (Founder & CEO, it.com Domains)

There are few people in the industry that have more experience in acquiring new top level domains than Joe Alagna. He spent almost 13 years immersed in the process of helping new domains come into existence during the first wave of new TLDs.  Almost 2,000 applications were received during that "gold rush" and Joe worked on about 60 of the applications that were successful. With a massive second round of new gTLDs on the horizon, Joe decided it was time to share what he learned from his experiences on the new TLD battlefield. 

That war zone is a busy one because the potential payoff is tantalizing. Joe explained, "A top-level domain like .realty or .art isn’t just a string. It’s a platform – a naming ecosystem that can host millions of second-level domains beneath it, each potentially worth hundreds, thousands, or sometimes millions of dollars individually. The operator controls pricing, policy, partnerships, and access. Operators of TLDs like .xyz, .io, and .ai have built multi-million-dollar enterprises by monetizing naming rights across niches. Verisign, which operates .com and .net, has become a $20+ billion company doing exactly this."

Joe's co-author, Intis Telecom Founder Andrey Insarov, is already running his own domain registry at it.com Domains. It is  the latest enterprise in what has been an extraordinarily successful entrepreneurial career that we detailed in a July 2022 Cover Story about Andrey. He gives the new book a first hand account of running a new domain registry, along with world class business advice that you can apply to any enterprise. If you are giving any thought at all to applying for a new gTLD next year, getting a copy of How to Get Your Own Top Level Domain would be a great place to start.

(Posted May 15, 2025)  

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