Ask HN: Has anyone used a .xxx domain for a non-adult site? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has anyone used a .xxx domain for a non-adult site?

5 pointsRileyJames3 comments

I’m considering using a .xxx domain for a non-adult site. (Software / Saas).

Has anyone else done this? Can anyone speak from experience? Is it a bad idea for any specific, technical reasons?

I can imagine they get automatically blocked / filtered by some corporate content filters, VPNs, firewalls. But I feel I could have a few secondary domains to cover access in those scenarios.

The name plays on the name/domain hack of “fill in the blank” ie: something.xxx

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I've never done this and I am not sure what would happen, but I would probably avoid getting a .xxx using your business name for any purpose other than parking on a different IP not owned by your business and avoiding someone else from registering it. One of the goals of .xxx was to allow the adult industries to make a clear distinction from non adult sites so people and browsers could avoid filters, adult content headers, etc... [1] AFAIK this never really took off. I don't know how search engines will factor in your business having a .xxx domain or if they will even do any correlation. At very least you should ask your marketing department to inquire within their circles about this. My concern would be the potential correlation to an indicator that your business has adult content, thus potentially excluding it from non age verified searches. This may not even be an issue, but if it were getting this fixed may be difficult. Reaching real people at the popular search engines can be time consuming.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.xxx

It depends on who is your target customer, but unless they are especially both tech-savvy and open-minded, this is probably a bad idea.

Most people will assume you mean something.xxx.com, or that it's a dev url and you haven't launched yet.

If they are brave enough or native enough to Google your name, whether or not your site ranks, they will be presented with pornography one way or the other.

Your url may or may not get automatically turned into a hyperlink in their email and chat clients.

As you said, your emails will not make it through corporate filters, your site will be blocked, etc.

You might be able to work around technical issues with secondary domains, but from a business perspective you will vastly limit the pool of clients willing to give you a shot.

If you’re looking for a fill in the blank kind of domain hack, is the “.xyz” available instead of .xxx?

Besides xyz being ‘clean’, I don’t usually associate xxx with fill-in-the-blank. Only moonshine and pornography.

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