Over 7000 .LA domains have been registered through GoDaddy since June 2013, making it one of the top domains for the site.
While the extension is technically the country code top-level domain name (ccTLD) for Laos, in 2013 it has been taken up as a city-specific option for Los Angeles, or LA as it is often called.
The sudden interest in .LA came when GoDaddy – the world’s largest domain name registrar and Web hosting provider – decided to auction off some domain names with this extension in July.
With prices for the domain names starting as low as $39.99 a year, GoDaddy made headlines on popular tech sites such as Mashable, with an auction of about 300 domains that were predicted to be particularly popular.
These domain names included the Hollywood industry-specific cheaptickets.la, studios.la and tube.la, beginning at $100 per domain.
“Go Daddy is hoping the new domain offerings will appeal to local business owners — those in Los Angeles and possibly also Louisiana — who haven’t been able to secure the name of their businesses using .com, .net or .org extensions,” Mashable reported at the time.
That goal to appeal to local businesses continues months later, when GoDaddy revealed it had sold over 7000 .LA domain names in the past five or so months.
More recent analysis from Domain Name Wire suggests the plan is paying off very well for the domain name registrar:
“At about $40 a year, that’s around $280,000 in registration fees not including premiums for the best domains,” reporter Andrew Allemann wrote, also noting that around half of all registrations GoDaddy received came from people in California.
While initially GoDaddy created specific marketing campaigns in Los Angeles, its view has broadened since then, with the registrar station that .LA could also be “an appropriate extension for Louisiana, Latin America, and people who speak Chinese (“la” translates to “hot”).”
“Registering a .la domain name gives you regional recognition and an easy-to-manage Web presence.”
While these types of domain name extensions are nowhere near as popular as the more traditional, iconic .COM, they could be a wise investment for people in particular businesses and industries.
City specific domain names are, in fact, predicted to be hot property in the near future, with launches and plans confirmed for cities like New York (.NYC), .London and even .Melbourne.
These domain names really provide an opportunity for you to get much more specific about where your online business is based, so they could be an affordable and useful alternative to other options with more generic extensions – assuming the domain name you want is offered at a reasonable price.