If you’ve been paying attention to the world of domain names (come on, who doesn’t?), then you’ll know that waves of new domain extensions are being released onto the market.

If you’re not happy with the usual .co.uk or .com, you can choose .ninja, .doctor, .london, .coffee … or any one of over a thousand other options.

For instance, London’s chain of Nimax theatres can now be found at www.nimaxtheatres.london.

Against this backdrop of new domains, leading travel site Booking.com (note the .com in the company’s name and logo) has launched a TV advertising campaign.

The ad closes with a simple tagline:

Booking.yeah
Planet Earth’s #1 Accommodation Site

Although it seems clever at first glance, this tagline could cause confusion.

As awareness of new domain names becomes more widespread, it’s perfectly conceivable that people could think Booking.yeah is a genuine domain name.

Except that it doesn’t exist. What’s more, it isn’t going to exist any time soon, because .yeah is not on the list of forthcoming domain extensions.

Even more confusingly, Booking.com has applied to run its own .booking domain. (I’m thinking hotels.booking, travel.booking, stuff like that.)

Frankly, with these new domains set to cause some confusion anyway, now seems like a bad time to start inventing non-existent domains just so you can finish your ad with a clever tagline.

But if your company has actually decided to invest time and money applying for its own domain extension, surely you’d think very carefully about what URLs you associate with your brand.