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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

The big change since the original days of the dotcom boom is that most people no longer find websites for the first time by typing "http://www.$FOO.com" in the address bar of their browser. It is an increasingly marginal means by which valuable new traffic is driven to domains. It goes beyond just web search; a large percentage of people "find" sites by clicking on links they see in their social media or their browsers automagically remembering the actual domain for them based on a few letters of the associated brand name. The app-ification of the Internet is also devaluing domain names as a branding vehicle.

This is analogous to why no one remembers phone numbers (or email addresses) anymore. Our phones and computers abstract that away for us so that we only need to know who we want to call. This has a lot of economy in every day usage.

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I believe it's still .com, then everything else, even if people typically find sites through search.

Why? If I write on a poster john.com, or on a cereal box, or on my business card, or I say 'visit us at john.com' on the radio, or my tv commercial says john.com at the end, people know exactly what to do. They recognize the words john.com as a website they can visit or search.

Now, if I say, 'visit us at john.ninja' on the radio, people have no idea what I'm even referring towards. If it's on my business card, people are wondering if my last name is ninja, or maybe this is just a fun play on words, and I refer to myself as john.ninja and the dot in-between the words is for design purposes. To fix that, you need to write more, www.john.ninja. However, it's still difficult for people to digest. Most people would probably ask, 'that's a website?', and then they would just visit google and type in 'john ninja', which may or may not get them to my site.

If you put http://john.ninja, I'd bet most people would figure it out.

As a side note, that's a real address :)

Since most modern browsers hide the http://, I'm sure a lot of people would still have no idea.

Only recently. Most people have seen http:// for years.

h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash is a phrase i ve never heard anywhere, while 'dotcom' is already in the lexicon.

I think people will go back to prefixing their address with www to make them recognizable as web addresses, e.g. www.john.ninja

Try saying that on the radio, or at a meeting, or during a presentation, or when networking with someone.

It's a mess, you're having a drink and meet someone in your industry. Oh, visit my site, it's john.ninja, or http://john.ninja. They'll give you the 'huh?' look, and you need to explain that it ends in .ninja instead of .com.

You'll always need to write a longer address and can't say john.ninja. You'll always need to explain in a little more detail how to visit the website. If your site ever becomes a huge success, lots of people will be visiting john.com, so hopefully they don't run a similar business or anything inappropriate one day.

Imagine if you were Netflix, and you ran the business using the domain Netflix.video. You would be going insane right now, and be willing to spend a small fortune trying to get a hold of Netflix.com. If you bought the domain for 20 million, people would agree it was a good move and investment. That's just how important having the .com domain is to a business.

Or www.john.ninja might be more recognisable than http://john.ninja. Albeit different URLs but the www is easier to accept than a ninja TLD.

> The big change since the original days of the dotcom boom is that most people no longer find websites for the first time by typing "http://www.$FOO.com" in the address bar of their browser.

You would be utterly shocked to learn that direct navigation advertising, domain rotation and other related businesses are thriving, with multi-hundred million dollar revenues.

It's not about "most" people, it's just, "financially viable people."

What I see is that direct navigation is slowly going the way of the boiled frog.

As for people on the bottom of the economic totem pole, many of them breathe their internet through a straw on some mobile "framily" plan and are often incredulous that there's this thing called WiFi you can use with a tablet. Thus they are getting forced to use modern browsers and the same thing will happen when a virus finally melts down their Windows XP machine for the last time.

I think it's more material the effect that this has on "seomaining". For a long time it was really good to have

$FOO.something

if you want to rank for $FOO. This would not give you good SEO by itself, but if you do everything else right, it's a big help. With so many domains out there, this signal will be weakened.

I agree except that domain names are still words, not numbers, so they're more memorable in the instances where they are visible.

It's also interesting to note that Google is making a large investment in New TLDs: http://www.google.com/registry/ -- In addition to owning a lot TLDs, they just paid $25 million for the rights to .app.

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