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Comment by htag | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

Or steam.com

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.

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 This non-.com ickiness seems to be an outdated US-centric perspective, never heard of it elsewhere.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

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