dot com et al
- Planted:
This morning I read panphora’s post on Bluesky about switching to a dot com domain. He cited Paul Graham’s advice to Change Your Name if you don’t have .com.
That was written almost a decade ago. So, do you still need a dot com domain?
They’re all taken
To state the obvious, dot com domains work well because customers know where to find you, and it signals legitimacy. The main problem is availability. As an experiment, I typed four adjacent words into Cloudflare’s domain registrar:
bean.combeans.combeanie.combeanies.com
To no surprise, none are available. But they’re not really all taken. beans.com serves a very simple static website. beanie.com is available for $200k, and both bean.com and beanies.com redirect. So it’s possible that all four of those are available, for a price.
In my experience, the vast majority of dot com domains for valid English words less than about 8 characters are already spoken for. That’s a very unscientific hunch, but more often than not I have to think outside of the box when buying a domain.
Alternatives
TLDs like .co, .info, .io, and .xyz have become common, but .com, .org, and .net still seem to dominate.
Every company in the top 20 of the Fortune 500 uses dot com (not counting abc.xyz because google.com is their real homepage, ofc). Of the 32 Top YC companies listed on ycombinator.com these days, only one doesn’t use a dot com (based in India, uses .in).
Lately there are tons of startups using .ai. Anguilla earned $32M in 2023 from .ai registrations, which is over 20% of their government’s total revenue (!). I’d think twice before buying a ccTLD now, though, after reading that .io is in jeopardy.
dot com, eventually
My gut tells me we’re at a tipping point where few dot com domains are available and the general public is ok with other TLDs. But maybe all startups wish they had .com eventually.
OpenAI recently bought chat.com for over $15M. And on a smaller, more relatable scale, Justin Duke wrote about paying $85k to buy buttondown.com (prev buttondown.email).
I do think novel TLDs are less controversial for lower stakes side projects like weeksofyour.life. And that’s good because I am a sucker for fun TLDs. Sometimes projects turn into day jobs, though, so the lines are blurry.