We’ve had a number of surprises running the .INK domain name extension. Perhaps the biggest was that we got the target market wrong! What drew us to .INK was the creative nature of the word. Whatever you would be using it for, it would be an artistic, creative, and engaging brand. Even at its most literal application, such as for ink manufacturers or printers, those businesses supply the raw goods to make art happen. Ink is the medium and the fuel behind so much art, from poetry to painting.

Still, when we launched .INK, we thought our biggest user base would be tattoo artists. After all, not only is “ink” a slang-term for tattoos themselves but it is some of the most prevalent art that relies solely on ink. It is shareable, interesting, and an industry unto itself. We didn’t get that wrong – there are many tattoo artists and studios using .INK. What we didn’t expect though, was that they would be outnumbered by the writers!

Bonnie McDermid’s editing and publishing website, wordsmith.ink that helps you get your book done from beginning strategy stages to publication. She works to organize your ideas, edits and proofs your work, and so much more. Her focus on your writing was perfectly suited to a creative and self-explanatory domain name as she helps ink your book idea into a reality.

Yes, the most common application for a .INK domain name for a website surprised us. Did you think of writers, bloggers, poets, and storytellers when you were thinking of .INK? It’s okay if you did – we’re glad that this group was smarter than we were!

Tech Think is a blog about everything tech, living on techth.ink. The blog provides helpful tips and tricks to readers. It also plays host to articles on industry news and much more. Allister, the writer, provides all sorts of technical commentary. He uses the .INK domain name as a “domain hack” with the work “think” – rather than just an extension, the extension is part of his brand name.

What we know now about .INK is that those that find and match with this unique, new extension tend to love it. It’s a creative and evocative TLD, more fun and playful than many of the more literal new domain options. Perhaps that was our issue when we imagined tattooists as our biggest market was that we too were thinking too literally. It’s absolutely perfect that those that are using .INK in a more loosely creative way helped us cue into this creative spirit for the domain and the people that use it.

More and more of the creative process is digital, just consider how drafts are typed and how sketches happen on touch screens. Many of the writers on .INK are using their website and eBooks to promote their first work and look for a publisher. Ink, for them, is evocative of the process, even if their first readers will not hold their writing on an actual inked page. In that way, it’s poetic. The ink domain playfully and poetically references the historic art of writing even if the site is a blog, or the writer remains unpublished. The written word and printing and now digital distribution have all been monumental cultural achievements and .INK is a unique way to reference that. It is fun to see individual bloggers, writers, poets, and story-tellers create a new way that we can interact with “ink” and their words on .INK domain names.