The mission and purpose of .follow is to give individuals, creators, and brands an open, generic namespace for building and directing an audience — personal and creator profiles, calls-to-action inviting visitors to follow an account, and social media aggregation or link-in-bio style pages that consolidate a person's presence across platforms.
The applicant will drive adoption of .follow through public relations outreach to creator economy and social media marketing outlets, direct marketing to influencers, creators, and brands building an online following, partnership development with social media management tools, link-in-bio platforms, and creator monetization services to secure anchor registrants, and coordinated promotion through the registrar channel to extend distribution and drive registration volume.
This purpose is sustainable over time because subscribing to another person's or brand's updates in order to stay connected to their activity is a core mechanic of social platforms that has persisted across every generation of social media, so demand for the namespace doesn't depend on any single platform remaining dominant.
The mission of .FOLLOW is to provide an accessible namespace for individuals, businesses, organizations, communities, projects, and other entities that identify with or wish to be associated with the concept of following, connection, participation, discovery, or ongoing engagement. The purpose of .FOLLOW is to enable registrants to establish distinctive online identities through domain names that reflect the concept represented by the applied-for string. To achieve this purpose, SUFFIX INC. will make .FOLLOW available for registration through accredited registrars and other appropriate distribution channels; maintain secure, stable, and reliable registry infrastructure; implement registration and operational policies that support the availability, security, and integrity of the namespace; and provide ongoing administration of the gTLD to enable registrants to register and use domain names within the namespace. The purpose of .FOLLOW is sustainable over time because “follow” is a broadly recognized term with enduring relevance across social, commercial, cultural, technological, educational, and community contexts. It is commonly associated with creators, publishers, brands, organizations, communities, fans, customers, users, and sources of information, while remaining flexible enough to serve evolving forms of communication, participation, and online engagement.
The mission of .follow is to give creators, publishers and communities a short, action-shaped address for the one place where an audience subscribes. The string is the ordinary English verb ""follow"" - to keep track of, or subscribe to, what someone publishes. It is applied for and will be operated in that plain descriptive sense.
Registrants are people and organisations that maintain an audience: independent creators, writers and bloggers, newsletter authors, podcasters, musicians, illustrators and photographers, small and independent media outlets, community organisers, associations and clubs, and businesses that operate an audience channel alongside their commercial site. Agencies and community managers acting on behalf of such registrants are equally welcome.
Users are audiences: readers, listeners, viewers and subscribers who are looking for the place to subscribe, and the platforms, directories and search services that route them there.
The positioning of the gTLD is based on the ""follow me"" call to action has become a universal convention, carried across languages as a loanword, but its destination is fragmented. A creator's audience is scattered across several platforms, each of which owns the relationship, sets the terms, and can change or withdraw them. When a platform declines or a creator moves, the audience has to be reacquired.
A domain the creator controls is the durable part of that chain. name.follow is a single address that reads as an instruction, can be printed on a poster, spoken aloud at the end of a video, or placed in a profile, and can be re-pointed as platforms rise and fall without the audience noticing. The renewed vitality of independent publishing - personal sites, newsletters and self-hosted feeds - reinforces the same need: a portable, creator-owned point of subscription.
The TLD will launch with the rights protection mechanisms required by Specification 7 of the Registry Agreement, including a Sunrise period and a Trademark Claims period. General Availability will then be open, with no eligibility restrictions and no reservation of the namespace to the applying entity or its affiliates. Distribution will be through ICANN-accredited registrars on published, non-discriminatory terms consistent with Specification 9. Technical operation is contracted to a pre-evaluated Registry Service Provider. Abuse mitigation follows the Mandatory Public Interest Commitments and the DNS abuse obligations of the Base Registry Agreement, with a published abuse point of contact.
The purpose is sustainable as the underlying behaviour is structural. Audiences subscribe; publishers seek subscribers. This predates social platforms and will outlast any particular one.
Also, the address is published, which creates a renewal incentive. A subscription address is printed, spoken and linked from third-party profiles; letting it lapse breaks the audience relationship it exists to protect.
The word is English but the convention is global, so the addressable market is not confined to one language market and pricing is deliberately accessible, so that individual creators are not excluded, and operations are backed by Identity Digital, an established infrastructure group and a pre-evaluated Registry Service Provider under a signed agreement.