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domains The plot to kill .com

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…. But as the internet became a business, businesses came to the internet, and they mostly picked .com. Those companies had the marketing budgets to plaster their full domain names – Amazon.com, Pets.com, Broadcast.com — on TV and billboards everywhere. (There's a reason it's called "the dot-com boom," after all.) Before long, .com was baked into the public understanding of the internet. It no longer meant "commercial." It just meant "website." "It became kind of a self-fulfilling thing," Nicks said. "Everybody was using .com, therefore everybody had to use .com."

The situation became untenable pretty quickly. Every memorable .com domain name was snapped up, and an aftermarket industry grew up around the newly scarce resource. Even the two-word .coms quickly became hard to come by. Large companies would buy tens or hundreds of thousands of domains, hoarding them for possible future products or just for future resale value. (Google, Microsoft and Amazon are three of the world's largest domain owners.) There may be unlimited space on the internet, but the good space became hard to find.

In 2011, ICANN tried to fix the problem by reinventing the way domain names work altogether. Its 16-member board of directors voted to increase the internet's TLDs from 22 to thousands. Websites could suddenly be dot-almost anything. "Today's decision will usher in a new internet age," ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said at the time. "We have provided a platform for the next generation of creativity and inspiration."

Name recognition

The general domains are harder. "It takes a lot of resources to market them," Frank Schilling said. "And there isn't a uniform playbook; it depends on the string."

Most people agree that .xyz is one of the most successful examples so far: It's not nearly at .com levels of fame, but it has attained a certain kind of mainstream understanding. Shayan Rostam, a longtime domain exec who helped launch .xyz, said he spent months making the case for the domain. "If .com were to be launched today, when all these other options are out there, do you think anybody's going to pick a .com in 2021?" he'd say. "I think any pragmatic person is going to say, no, .com doesn't make sense as a domain ending. But .xyz, it's the ending of the alphabet, it's the ending of the domain name."

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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Accept it is not about killing .com

It is about creating more opportunity in a space that is greatly misunderstood

There’s only so many papers you can stack to the ceiling before you have to start a new pile
 
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Cities can get trendy while Manhattan still stands.
 
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Good article, but I'd say it primarily argues the case for .com while identifying the marketing costs of alternatives. It hypothesized maybe the ngtlds will gain acceptance in 20 years.
 
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Avatar dot io sold for $90,000, do you think the .com owner are crying about that? Same with the Metaverse dot io sale, the .com owners will be loving it as the value of their domain has risen.

Truth is all these .io sales (and other substantial sales in other extensions) just make .com’s even stronger.

I can’t see it ending soon, .com is embedded into everyone’s mind who go on the web, .io/.co or extension like .xyz isn’t to anyone outside domain investing, they have no clue what it is, if you told someone your business address was name dot xyz, the average Joe would pull this face O_o<--- as soon as you finished saying ".xyz" to them or they would think it’s a scam site.
 
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if you told someone your business address was [B said:
name dot xyz[/B], the average Joe would pull this face O_o<--- as soon as you finished saying ".xyz" to them or they would think it’s a scam site.

O_oO_oO_oO_oO_oO_o
 
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The eye of the beholder.

Some think like that because there are indeed a lot of scam sites on xyz. Couple years ago I even blocked all emails from .xyz and .cyou. And I know a lot of other mail servers still do this. Which is a problem.

A couple .xyz got me banned from Sedo parking cause I didn't monitor them. Had no clue original owners might still be running bots there... Anyway I dont' really park for $ so it wasnt a big loss. But food for thought.

Other customers value the xyz. The value is in the eye of the beholder. I'd say that for each buyer that accepts xyz, there are 99 others that will look for anything else, .net,.org or even .me or .biz etc,
it's still many years from full acceptance. I did a massive .xyz experiment (10k investment) and I'm not going to recover all of it, it seems. Fortunately I'm profitable enough over everything else. This was an assumed risk but it worked less well than I expected even at 50 cents a reg.

One word brandables can do well as xyz. I have a few of these now and will be renewing them. Normal everyday domains, like 2-words or variations, not really. Not yet. So again it will be many years when it will reach say .org or .io level of desirability for example.
 
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we learned on dot com in the 90s and had babies before they came out with the other extensions. No, dot com is embedded in our memories too deep to die off. (also net and org)
 
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Clickbait title.

.Com will never be destroyed.

They will waste their lives’ “plotting” away.
 
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Everyday I'm reading this: ".Com is about to die soon and be replaced." Even today on Reddit - people singing the same ol' tune.

The problem is, I've been hearing this for a decade already.

On to the next decade, same song.
 
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When you introduce inferior items, it only makes the quality items that much more valuable and in demand.

If you have .COM, you don't need anything else.

205828_29d24e55e9b58f2457f2a202c50871f8.jpg
 
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The idea of new extensions making high quality options widely available for low prices was a false promise. All the new extensions did is make the registries the domainer.

Almost all the quality terms were reserved and the registries demanded high registration and/or renewal prices.

If not them, domain investors grabbed all the high quality terms. So in essence, you really never had high quality options for low prices.

Brad
 
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The Good, the Bad and the .CFD - the one that is going to disrupt ...

cfd.jpg
 
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If you have .COM, you don't need anything else.
:ROFL:

I can't confirm that.
Although I have a few .com's, I only use them as forwarders to their .top equivalents.
If I would have to delete one of both versions, it would be the .com version.
 
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Was a good article and a fun interview with the author. I liked Jason Calacanis' point: "If you can get the dot-com for your company for $10K to $100K, it's generally worth it."
 
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I'd be interested to see some stats which companies (by nation) buy .com's.

Obviously the dominant market is the US for .com's and American companies are quite happy to pay several millions if the domain is ultra-premium, but how many UK companies pay 6 figures/millions for .com's? How many French/German/Canadian etc?

I know Chinese companies invested big in .com's a few years ago, but this seems to have dried up a bit now, companies from 1 country with a large economy i don't think have really paid big for online branding is India, a lot of Indian companies use English dictionary words in domain names, but companies from India have never really pay big for domains (as far as i know).
 
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It is kind of like saying, "I'm going to build a website on my own that does everything Amazon does, only better."

Good luck with that.

I invest in some non .coms, but I am realistic about it, I have lowered expectations.
 
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Obviously the dominant market is the US for .com's and American companies are quite happy to pay several millions if the domain is ultra-premium, but how many UK companies pay 6 figures/millions for .com's? How many French/German/Canadian etc?

.com is like the phone country code and it means USA or global
.de means Germany
.uk means UK

You need a .de domain for the German market, like you need to dial +49 to call a German number.

No mystery.
 
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.com is like the phone country code and it means USA or global
.de means Germany
.uk means UK
"(.)com" means "(.)com(mercial)".
"(.)de" means "(.)de(utschland)".
"(.)uk" means "(.)u(nited)k(ingdom)".

And "(.)top" means "(.)top".
With or without the dot
(since the dot is technically not part of the TLD (no matter which one)).

That being said, I am not part of a plot to kill .com nor do I want .com to be killed.
I am just here
(no matter where) to remind that .com is not top.
 
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.com is like the phone country code and it means USA or global
.de means Germany
.uk means UK

You need a .de domain for the German market, like you need to dial +49 to call a German number.

No mystery.

You are wrong on so many things.

1) .com isn't the phone code for US, .us is actually the US domain phone country code (if you will), but the .us extension has never really took off and American companies adopted .com as the primary domain extension.

2) .co.uk is the extension of choice many UK companies go with, i don't know any major company in the UK who use .uk as there main website, but majority of large UK companies (FTSE 100), medium and small also use .com and I'm sure its the same for other countries.

What i don't know is how many UK companies (and companies from other countries) paid millions to acquire a .com as a company investment, hence why i asked but after i asked the question i had a little think and i believe Casino dot com is a UK company and I'm fairly certain they would have paid a huge amount of money for the .com, so if that's the case I'm sure there are many more.
 
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You probably have a time machine, most of us do not.

.co.uk is the extension of choice many UK companies go with, i don't know any major company in the UK who use .uk

co.UK ends with .uk, have you noticed? So it is .UK!

There was no choice!
.uk was not possible, so everybody had to use .co.uk

.com isn't the phone code for US

I have never said that.

.us is actually the US domain phone country code.

.com is de facto, because .us came too late.
.gov is USA (not .gov.us)
.mil is USA (not .mil.us)
 
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co.UK ends with .uk, have you noticed? So it is .UK!

There was no choice!
.uk was not possible, so everybody had to use .co.uk

What are you going on about?

There is a .co.uk and .uk.
 
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What are you going on about?

There is a .co.uk and .uk.

Exactly as I wrote
.uk was not possible, so everybody had to use .co.uk
.us was not possible, so everybody had to use .com.
 
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…. But as the internet became a business, businesses came to the internet, and they mostly picked .com. Those companies had the marketing budgets to plaster their full domain names – Amazon.com, Pets.com, Broadcast.com — on TV and billboards everywhere. (There's a reason it's called "the dot-com boom," after all.) Before long, .com was baked into the public understanding of the internet. It no longer meant "commercial." It just meant "website." "It became kind of a self-fulfilling thing," Nicks said. "Everybody was using .com, therefore everybody had to use .com."

The situation became untenable pretty quickly. Every memorable .com domain name was snapped up, and an aftermarket industry grew up around the newly scarce resource. Even the two-word .coms quickly became hard to come by. Large companies would buy tens or hundreds of thousands of domains, hoarding them for possible future products or just for future resale value. (Google, Microsoft and Amazon are three of the world's largest domain owners.) There may be unlimited space on the internet, but the good space became hard to find.

In 2011, ICANN tried to fix the problem by reinventing the way domain names work altogether. Its 16-member board of directors voted to increase the internet's TLDs from 22 to thousands. Websites could suddenly be dot-almost anything. "Today's decision will usher in a new internet age," ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said at the time. "We have provided a platform for the next generation of creativity and inspiration."

Name recognition

The general domains are harder. "It takes a lot of resources to market them," Frank Schilling said. "And there isn't a uniform playbook; it depends on the string."

Most people agree that .xyz is one of the most successful examples so far: It's not nearly at .com levels of fame, but it has attained a certain kind of mainstream understanding. Shayan Rostam, a longtime domain exec who helped launch .xyz, said he spent months making the case for the domain. "If .com were to be launched today, when all these other options are out there, do you think anybody's going to pick a .com in 2021?" he'd say. "I think any pragmatic person is going to say, no, .com doesn't make sense as a domain ending. But .xyz, it's the ending of the alphabet, it's the ending of the domain name."

Like with .xyz, .online is another successful example of an affordable alternative when the .com isn't available. I'm the very proud owner of 3,100 .online domains who's exact match .com equivalent's are valued at over 18M dollars. Domain investors are now saying that if you own the .com to protect your brand you should own the .online version too. Example, NamesCon.com and NamesCon.online.

Final point/example....while there are 10M Lexus on the road, there are over 100M+ lesser Lexus's on the road, but they're ALL able to get you to your destination. My wife drives a Lexus because she can afford it, but I drive a Rav4 because it's practical, comfortable, affordable and works for me.

.com won't die in my lifetime, but .online is getting closer every day, much to the chagrin of the hard line old timers:xf.wink:
 
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