discuss Why wouldn't Opensea rebrand to Opensea.com?

[abstractdomainer]

I am sure that if you are not living under a rock, you would have heard about NFTs. And if you are a little more familiar, you would be knowing about Opensea as well.
Opensea is like the Mecca of NFT creators and investors. It is the marketplace that one goes to, if they are into NFT investments, either as a buyer, seller, or enthusiast.

OpenSea operates at Opensea.io and also owns the OpenSea.com domain name. They started off as OpenSea.io. I couldn't understand that such a large established org, even after owning the .COM would redirect it to .IO. That's like redirecting it to a less popular extension in general.

Why would a company not do that? Wouldn't you rebrand to .COM had you been on the board?

 

[Xiberia]

It's just changing the parent domain name, isn't it? And forwarding .IO to .COM?

Yep. What they said makes no sense. Redirecting IO to COM for the website doesn't mean they have to rewrite their internal code, APIs or anything else.

Companies routinely use different domains from their brand/website address for back-end applications and services.

themeforest might be the only one doing it. COM to ORG could be the business model or the business principle switch altogether.

Not sure what you mean, but they are all simply forwarding .COM to an address/brand they're most known by, just like Opensea is doing.

 

[jhm]

Why oh why oh my gawd oh my gawd they have the dot-com..

There is no need to. What's the rush. They are established and they have the com fowarded.

Dot-com isn't the be all and end all when you already have a good, recognizable domain and brand.

When it's a true upgrade, like from a sub-par, easily forgotten name, then I would be surprised if the brand didn't use their new acquisition.

Sometimes it's enough to just own the holy grail version and have it under your protection without having to prominently display or use it.

I remember my 5 year hunt for the dot-com exact match to my new G'. When I finally got it, I realized all this time the thrill was the hunt and not the prize. My new G' already came up first in searches. My new G' looked awesome on its own, it didn't need no com. So, was happy to have the .com but really it was useless to rebrand and just have it forwarded too.

It may strengthen your brand to have both, certaintly, but really on a strong name and established brand already, the dot-com is just icing.

Said it better than me. I think its a bit cool anyway if you actually own the "COM" of your brand, but you don't find it necessary to have it at the forefront of your site, IMO

 

[jamesau]

Yep. What they said makes no sense. Redirecting IO to COM for the website doesn't mean they have to rewrite their internal code, APIs or anything else.

Companies routinely use different domains from their brand/website address for back-end applications and services.



Not sure what you mean, but they are all simply forwarding .COM to an address/brand they're most known by, just like Opensea is doing.

For the sake of semantics they are already redirecting the .com to the .io

Perhaps you are a Solidity developer and know better, but changing domain is not trivial for a big organisation.

 

[Xiberia]

For the sake of semantics they are already redirecting the .com to the .io

Where did I say they weren't redirecting the .com to the .io?

Perhaps you are a Solidity developer and know better, but changing domain is not trivial for a big organisation.

Nothing is trivial for big organizations. Perhaps you can just explain why redirecting www.opensea.io to www.opensea.com would require lots of changes to code.

 

[topdom]

Redirecting is easy and safe. Rebranding may be complicated. Change emails, folders, filenames, logo, scripts,.. And they can do it eventually anyway. Getting the .com is enough for traffic. Maybe they mean: we can afford the .com, but the reason we didn't have it before is not that we were poor at that time. Similarly sometimes nonhypen version redirects to hypen version. Germans do it a lot.
nafter may do the same eventually.

 

[dirk]

Said it better than me. I think its a bit cool anyway if you actually own the "COM" of your brand, but you don't find it necessary to have it at the forefront of your site, IMO

On a global view, .com ain't king therefore it doesn't make sense to use .com as your main domain when your ccTLD is established and appreciated by your target audience.

Their niche is about being part of the cool kids club (and innovation!?). They don't care about .com. at the same time they had the business sense to accommodate everyone else who got stuck in the stone age and automatically visits a .com.

Hence, the redirect. Like zoom. No rocket science.

.com is king... Depending on your Audience.

 

[pranker]

twitch does the same thing. they redirect twitch.com to twitch.tv

im beginning to think its a way of looking unique

 

[pranker]

On a global view, .com ain't king therefore it doesn't make sense to use .com as your main domain when your ccTLD is established and appreciated by your target audience.

Their niche is about being part of the cool kids club (and innovation!?). They don't care about .com. at the same time they had the business sense to accommodate everyone else who got stuck in the stone age and automatically visits a .com.

Hence, the redirect. Like zoom. No rocket science.

.com is king... Depending on your Audience.

exactly this

nfts are all about being in a unique club, mixed with forefront of tech. .io is used by forward thinking startups and does sound exclusive.

 

[Domainace]

As much as they tried to ignore it the .io extension is still completely unrecognisable outside the tech world.

Since anyone using OpenSea is handling NFTs, crypto and crypto wallets, I doubt they will have trouble recognizing a TLD other than dotcom. Dotcom is still king, but it has considerably less importance among younger and more tech savvy generations. Grandma's shoe store may need dotcom, but most crypto-based sites will not. They will want it, and will likely buy it when they become big enough, but it won't be essential to their initial success. Maybe OpenSea hopes to bring in the less tech savvy users in the future, and that's why they bought the name. For the money they must be making, the cost of the dotcom would have been peanuts.

 

[Dan Names]

I know FOR SURE, that just 3 weeks ago (and from this point previous), the domain
opensea.com DID NOT redirected to opensea.io

I myself made that experience, a half year ago, and then again...
as I was curious about a smiliar question (why didn't they redirect -com to -io).

Either you were one of the 'nft' guys, and thus it was no surprise to you,
or you were a newcomer and either had to google it ... ot tried opensea.io, when you heard about that marketplace (as in my case).


My theory: They want/ed a specific audience to go on their website.

They are "alternative", as is the whole crypto / nft space.

And therefore, you have to break with old fashioned styles.

Thus .io

 

[almasri]

I am sure that if you are not living under a rock, you would have heard about NFTs. And if you are a little more familiar, you would be knowing about Opensea as well.
Opensea is like the Mecca of NFT creators and investors. It is the marketplace that one goes to, if they are into NFT investments, either as a buyer, seller, or enthusiast.

OpenSea operates at Opensea.io and also owns the OpenSea.com domain name. They started off as OpenSea.io. I couldn't understand that such a large established org, even after owning the .COM would redirect it to .IO. That's like redirecting it to a less popular extension in general.

Why would a company not do that? Wouldn't you rebrand to .COM had you been on the board?

IMO, it makes sense for many reasons:

• It is about creating/uplodaing/downloading NFTs. So, in a way, the main activity is about input/output data
• NFT is quite a new concept, it makes sense from marketing point of view to use a new TLD rather than classic standard .com
• They have nothing to loose, because .com is redirected to their io site

 

[Acroplex]

That's a great question and it all comes down to brand familiarity.

I'll give you an example: Twitch.tv.

They spend a very nice chunk to acquire the domain Twitch.com in 2015.

That's 7 years ago. They still point the .com to the .tv because the large followship identifies the brand as "Twitch.tv."

It's a marketing decision, a corporate decision, a fundamental indication that the brand is too established to roll out a domain change.

That being said, OpenSea did the right thing to acquire (buy) the .com without resorting to "Plan B" attempts (UDRP.)

 

[maya-zir]

maybe their programmers coded it so bad and confusing and now they need to make a lot of redirects but they are too lazy for it and so they just redirect the .com domain to the io?

 

[jedaprin]

Because only moses opens the sea

 

[abstractdomainer]

That's a great question and it all comes down to brand familiarity.

I'll give you an example: Twitch.tv.

They spend a very nice chunk to acquire the domain Twitch.com in 2015.

That's 7 years ago. They still point the .com to the .tv because the large followship identifies the brand as "Twitch.tv."

It's a marketing decision, a corporate decision, a fundamental indication that the brand is too established to roll out a domain change.

That being said, OpenSea did the right thing to acquire (buy) the .com without resorting to "Plan B" attempts (UDRP.)

Thanks for the insight! Yes, that was a smart move! Or rather ethical one!