Question for domain And marketing gurus

First step is to always obtain a .com , anything less is a step backwards in my view.

Using other extensions will always result in losing a percentage of traffic to the .com

LOLZ.

Alot of those companies with cute non-dotcoms end up later paying big bucks for the corresponding dotcom. Also, when you run ad campaigns, you will often lose type-in traffic to the dotcom.. AKA lose money.

Dotcom is King and always will be.

Don't launch a product/ service without owning the dotcom. This is just my opinion.

But, if you just want something amateurish and local and you don't plan on going big, or if don't care about reaching deep in your pocket to pay off someone later, pick whichever extension of the month suits your fancy.

I understand that in the above example it's obviously better to have screw.com versus screw.me. Just was wondering if you can't afford screw.com is it better to go with screw.me versus a made up word like fucknizzle.com or a 4+ word .com?

Like you mentioned above it seems like a trend on the mainstream side is to start with something cute and brandable with a less desirable extension and then once they have attracted attention (ie: profits or investor $) they pick up the .com extension. Curious as to the experts thoughts on that sort of marketing strategy.

.com ftw

posted by DaddyHalbucls:
Can you name some?

It depends on the industry. There have been a lot of social sites for instance doing well on alternate extensions, purely because they are utilizing domain hacks either of words/phrases or of a brand (like instagr.am, though bear in mind they bought instagram.com later).

They still have to have something REALLY interesting to succeed in that way, and in general they'd be better served getting a .com, but it's not altogether a bad idea to go that route IF you're doing a social site, app, etc. For other industries, probably not a good idea unless it's a REALLY good hack (like in our case, we are using Doma.in for one of our domain sites).

Even if you have to spend more to get a decent .com, much better to do that than lose people with an extension that sites in your industry typically aren't on.

I am here to read what the marketing gurus have to say for themselves.

del.icio.us rebranded as delicious.com in 2008.

ccTLDs (2-letter extensions) are NOT governed by ICANN policy.

The country (ie. Montenegro for .me) to which the ccTLD is delegated makes the rules - they could raise the renewal fee to anything they want, delete domains anytime, etc ... and more to the point, compared to gTLDs (.com, .net, etc), many ccTLDs have strict restrictions on what's permitted / usage.

And that goes for .US too ... the .US ccTLD operator, by order of the U.S. Dept of Commerce, forbids .US domains with certain dirty words ... the U.S. government ordered retroactive deletion of numerous such domains, including FuckCensorship.US

Not saying ccTLDs are automatically bad, but often best to use a gTLD, especially if the site is intended for a global audience (for localized content, ccTLDs, such as for Germany can be more ideal) and/or is of a nature that may bring extra scrutiny, such as an adult site.

Ron

I read a post by thedoc on here that claimed he had tested branding and marketing the non .com and watched the subsequent ancillary results to the .com.

posted by CYF:
I'm not saying none exist, because obviously some do; however, it should be noted that the "complicated" nature of del.icio.us as a domain name made it all but certain that the site would have trouble getting out of its geek niche if they didn't rebrand -- that puts it in a slightly different category than other domain hacks. (It's also worth noting that the founder of Delicious didn't like the domain himself, and characterised it as a mistake years before the change. [fuck, still can't post links: randsinrepose.com/archives/2004/12/03/a_delicious_interview.html ])

The reason that I am questioning DH's post is the implication that it is somehow an inevitability that any domain hack will lose traction to its .com equivalent, and/or will eventually have to be shelved or rebranded or co-branded etc. How much traffic does bit.ly lose to bit.com? Interent users are a little smarter now about ccTLDs and generic "noncoms" than they used to be, and many of the smarter hacks are using the extension as a pronounceable party of the name, particularly those using .ly, .me and .us (vs. some idiots you can find at domain forums registering things like danc.es and saying "Look! Dances! Can you believe such a valuable domain was available?") Really, working it in as either a pronounceable aspect of the name or a reasonable association (eg. those ccTLDs that hapen to correspond to postal codes, leading to cool names like Atlanta.GA) are about the only ways to do a "proper" hack, and I'd much rather have something like Fuck.It than CoolVideosOfPeopleWhoDontGiveAFuck.com or Spank.Me than FreakyBitchesWhoLikeToBeSpanked.com which I think speaks more to the original poster's question than issues of potential brand leach to the .com My experience with ccTLD word plays is limited, but from what I can guess from owning gTLDs in bulk, I'm losing a lot more to .coms from my .nets than I am from my .mes


Frank

You wouldn't happen to have a link to that, would you?

Go with dot com. I don't care if you have something cool like fishing.net I can guarantee that they lose plenty of hits and traffic to the guys that have fishing.com or fishingnets.com.
Fact of life .com is king. And that just one more reason why .xxx should go fuck themselves.

very true unless its a .com dont bother buying the domain

Lets say you have a good name in mind and it's available with all tlds.. We'll used screwme as an example. You would 1st get the .com - screwme.com and IF you wanted to you could get screw.me. Now, if you chose to you could have the main site on screw.me and just redirect the .com to screw.me. This way you would not lose any of the traffic that screwme.com would/could potentially get.

This is the same for any other site you want to start.. ALWAYS start with the .com.. No one is going to type screw.me just for fun to see what might be there, but people will type screwme.com. Always have all bases covered. This way you do not start a site on a .net, .org, .me or ,anything besides the .com and a few months later be pissed off because you are not making anywhere near the $ you had hoped. All while someone else registered the .com and fucking you in the end.

Sorry I don't. After reading more replies in this thread though I do think it had more to do with other gTLDs like branding the .net rather than say rape.me.

1. Sedo.de
After $80,000 (and lots of begging) they acquired Sedo.com

2. DogTag.com
$28,000 upgrade from DogTag.co.uk

3. iMusica.com
It's an $18,000 upgrade from iMusica.com.br

That was big.

The arguments about type-in traffic, as anyone who is holding a significant portfolio of domains will tell you, is kind of specious -- unless you're talking about super-premium names (such as Screw.com in the example above) the amount of type-ins the average domain gets is negligible, and the state of the domain parking industry is a pretty clear indicator of the value of that type-in traffic (ie. "shit.")

Getting the .com for a name can be a good idea for a lot of reasons, especially when compared to other gTLDs, particularly .net (.org can be very useful for names that sound "organisational" however, and anecdotal evidence suggests that they do not suffer brand leach nearly as badly as .net, .info or other gTLDs.) But trying to base the decision purely on stuff like type-ins, or because you "just have to" get the .com, is setting yourself up for spending a potentially sizable amount of money that you don't have to.

None of the examples you posted match the claim -- all were foreign companies expanding their markets, not companies who purchased the "wrong" TLD then scrambled to grab the .com to protect their brands. In fact, particularly in the case of a well-known domain industry player like SEDO, the UDRP would have gotten them that name for a song if it was being used to deliberately dilute their brand.

Again, as I've said in subsequent posts, I'm not trying to make an idiotic claim like "no benefit to having a .com" Just saying that actual brand leach is much more common on gTLDs than on meaningful hacks (ie. you can throw out Dances.com vs. Danc.es since the latter is a fucking stupid name no one should register for any reason) and that niceties like monetisable type-in traffic are pretty much a thing of the past, that are not likely to return to the domain business anytime soon.


Frank

There is nothing like .com

.com is the king.

Forget about .whatever