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Comment by AgentK20 | Hacker News Reader

I think this is honestly less about the notoriety of .com, and more about the lack of affordable and available domains for startups to purchase. Got a five letter named startup? That’ll cost you tens of thousands of dollars, IF you can even get it. Meanwhile there’s hundreds of gTLDs that you can buy a domain on for $10-$30/yr.

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Having a dotcom is a signal of the organization's wealth. If your company is worth $3B, and your cash position is good, spending 0.01% of your valuation on a dotcom ($300k) is a no brainer. It might add to your legitimacy and prestige (even if marginally) and it's an asset that will most likely increase in value over time.

> an asset that will most likely increase in value over time.

This is actually a myth. See the changing of hands of sex.com. Also, Domain names are being less important as users stay within apps / content platforms like FB, Instagram and TikTok. Also Google Search and soon ChatGPT.

Reminds me of nissan.com, which is now nearly worthless because Nissan Motors doesn't care anymore.

I thought that was what Nissan (the domain owner,not the motor company) wanted, that motor company leaves him alone, & don't bother him while he uses his lastname domain.

If I remember right he owned a computer company he used the domain for, but he pretty much devoted his domain to his anti-nissan campaign until he passed away.

Or steam.com

The future value of domain names aren't certain, but I think they are a fairly safe bet. They are viewed in to email addresses, search results, web address bars, and hyperlinks. I don't think a platform is going to usurp these. Walled gardens have been attempting to do this since AOL keywords.

The domain name system predates the Internet. Just food for thought.

Makes sense. Nobody just blindly navigates to a domain name. You either know it for sure or you search.

> Having a dotcom is a signal of the organization's wealth.

The pricing of .com domains is extremely uneven, depending on your name. It could be $20.

> legitimacy and prestige

Since it’s semantically equivalent to other TLDs, it lies entirely in the eye of the beholder. This non-.com ickiness seems to be an outdated US-centric perspective, never heard of it elsewhere. The rest of the world are used to other TLDs, and some (say ai, io, app) indicate other positive business values.

> If your company is worth $3B, and your cash position is good, spending 0.01% of your valuation on a dotcom ($300k) is a no brainer.

So an established company should switch domain name and you’re not factoring in the cost of that? Or they should just have the .com on the side (but then how will the majority of your customers know about your state of the art .com domain)? Or should startups buy a $300k domain upfront?

> This non-.com ickiness seems to be an outdated US-centric perspective, never heard of it elsewhere.

Not exactly true, for example for most German users not having a .de is odd. .com and .net already feel like a stretch for many. Beyond that other TLDs/gTLDs are not really trusted by most from what I can tell.

Speaking of (and confirming your point), ai.com redirects to chatgpt as of ~1 week ago...!

https://mashable.com/article/chatgpt-ai-dot-com-domain-name-...

If my company is every worth $3b then I'll think about buying the .com for $300k.

However right now $300k is much better spent on staff, hosting and other business things.

Moreso if you're a $3bn company, you certainly don't want _someone else_ owning the .com for the same reason — it lends legitimacy.

Even if they don't use the .com as their primary domain, they'll still buy it and redirect so that no-one else squats on it / phishes from it.

Why would having .com domain add any prestige?

Because there's only one. It's like a bunch of Chinese restaurants fighting over the name 'CN Wall', but there's only one that'll be able to hold 'cnwall.com'.

(~$5k).

this, .com domains are an ego thing more than anything at this point. Why waste valuable money on a vanity thing rather than trying to fuel growth? I guess in the worst case somebody could try to trick potential customers but otherwise as an early startup you have bigger things to worry about than a domain name

They are artificially necessary in some cases.

I have a personal .com and a gTLD based domain. THis is mostly to retain control of mailflow (I use workspace but can always move it, and have in the past)

The number of services/online forms that wont accept a .email domain is still very high.

I would imagine at a business level this would be equally difficult, even if its just for B2B type transactions/relationships.

Same. I have a .family domain which is great, but about 1/3rd of the registration flows claim it’s an “invalid email address”. I have an older .org to fall back on, but it would be nice to use one domain for everything.

Imagine spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to get your own TLD and then discovering that "username@tld" emails just won't be accepted by basically anything. RIP username@google :(

That is indeed true for gTLDs (I've experienced it with .online), but from my experience never the case for ccTLDs. Maybe .tk that is (or was) handed out for free, but I never had any problem with ccTLDs I've owned (.me, .dj, .sh).

So, .com isn't the only silver bullet, and from what I can tell from that chart, only .app and .tech may be somewhat affected.

interesting. Just registered a couple ccTLD's.

I have a .com. But its super long and I dont really like it. Its also the primary domain in workspace since i have had it since gsuite was free but before they closed the free tier registration ~2012.

Now that I'm a paid user (by forced attrition) im looking to honestly just migrate the TLD of the workspace to something less cumbersome to type.

.email is really the primary at this point.

.in is rejected by discover for email address, its a cctld. .us was fine.

Can confirm. My .email is regularly reject even by my own country administration.

This. Discover bank literally said email ending with .in is not a valid email. As if no Indian moves to US & still keeps his own domain.in email address. It happily accepted .us email.

getting a .com means there s less chance of it being trademarked also. and it's not that hard to come up with a decent name that's not taken (eg. airbnb)

Why choose a name that's unavailable? pretty much every tech company has a weird .com name, and that's fine

No, it's not ego. Normal non-tech people are untrusting of anything not .com

I also believe that changing your domain after you build an user base is challenging from a UX perspective. Many users have saved their credentials on their browser's password manager, and if the domain changes, the auto fill didn't work anymore.

Courious about why Notion owns the .com but still using the .so.

To prove your point I got borg.games for $20/yr for my p2p cloud gaming startup yesterday. Although lots of other good names were "premium" and costed upwards of $5000.

borggames.com is available and will cost you $10/yr.

Meanwhile my four letter domain, lwei.com, gets no offers and is appraised at like $1000.

There’s still stuff available for reasonable prices but it’s just a lot of work so it’s easier to get some random tld.

Well sure you can also run a random string generator and get a short .com TLD, but that's not the point.

No 3 letter.com domain is available to register (all combinations are registered, can only be bought). 4 letter mixed numbers letters are sure available. I am not sure of 4 letters only is available. 5 letters only sure is available.

I bought a three letter domain at one of the original TLDs for $3k or so, they can be surprisingly reasonable depending on your use case.

Pretty sure all 4 and 5 letter .com domains have been taken since at least a decade.

4 letter ones are all taken, but there are still 5 letter domains available. I wanted a short domain for personal use and bought xlmpq.com

A fellow ascii art enjoyer :)

And very few of them will ever serve anything useful.

So many random 5 letter, letters only domains are available. If you add numbers & hypen to mix, it baloons to thousands.

Today I realized how xkcd prob got it's name

There’s a faq on this on the site (find it yourself). It was created as an unpronounceable “acronym” (although it doen’t stand for anything) and the domain came later when Randall was still an unknown. It’s old enough that a lot of “normal” domain names were still available, but the name itself was one of the jokes.

Possibly, although the official explanation is that it's "just a word with no phonetic pronunciation". There's a "What does XKCD stand for?" section on the About page. https://xkcd.com/about/

Randall wanted a unique short string associated with all his work. That way he could Google "xkcd" and find everything he ever did online. I believe he had a script that generated all possible 4-letter combinations and filtered out ones with any search results, and settled on "xkcd". But he became a victim of his own success when the comic became so popular and "xkcd" is now synonymous with the comic.

Source: talk by Randall, might be this one but I'm not sure: https://youtu.be/zJOS0sV2a24.

That's Iwei robbery!

"our company is called Iwei, and you can reach us at Lwei dot com"

Appraised by whom? What's a domain's value if no one wants to pay for it?

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