Winners make their cases in videos.

Voting has opened to pick the grand prize winner in Verisign’s Internet Official contest.

The fifteen winners so far each received $5,000. The grand prize winner will pick up a cool $30,000.

Each of the winners was asked to create a video about why they picked their domain name. I just watched all fifteen, and I have to say there’s a wide gap in quality. But voting won’t just be about which video is better…I suspect social media promotion will win the day.

I think running this contest was ingenious. Verisign was able to show that good .com domain names are available for registration (even if they’re hard to find). Some of the winners have domains that match new domain name extensions, too.

Honestly, I think some of the new TLD operators should have thought of and executed on this idea first. It would have made a huge impact having people ask their friends on social media to vote for their domain names based on new TLDs.