Ask HN: Are uncommon TLDs (.ly, .io) viable for average users?

4 pointskmfrk2 comments

It's difficult to see the world from someone else's perspective. Rather than conjecture, I'd be interested to see if someone had done the research to verify that domains ending in something else than .com, .net or .org (or the national ccTLD).

Heck, maybe .net and .org even confuses some users.

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If you recall a while back, a blog post became the top result for typing "facebook" into the firefox address bar (or something along those lines - see http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/some-people-cant-...).

If the conclusions of this are to be believed, I would say that the URL matters very little.

Larger companies which use uncommon TLD's generally buy both the TLD specific domain (ie recur.ly) and its .COM version (ie recurly.com).

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