building a brand on a .net

read it wrong.

I think it only works if your brand begins with "N"

close - it's an 'M'

Yes it is absolutely possible, but you know this Mutt.

the Hun too, they have both the .net and .com but most people seem to refer to it as thehun.net

definitely possible.

Possible but you're gonna lose xx% of traffic to the .com if you're going to build a well-known brand.

no go unless you own the .com too

you can roll around in the fluff and dream.... or face the truth:

forget it.

anything less than .com is shit.

Build away, but alot of the value you build will be for the .COM

I agree with that.

We build adultreviews.net and ended up buying .com once we got money for it.

ok, this guy has been squatting on this .com domain for 10 years - let's say i build something real on the .net version. can i then trademark my name and the go after his .com because even though he reg'ed the domain 10 years ago I'm actually running a business on the .net and he's doing nothing but squatting?

Wow nice so your idea is to fuck someone else over simply because you want it?

Easy answer, NO this doesn't work. You cannot prove bad faith as the TM is created after the registration date and the registrant could have had no way of knowing of your trademark. Bad faith is one of the requirements in a WIPO procedure.

I usually like your posts and what you have to say but that is just foul and you can not justify your actions by saying he's "squatting". He was smart enough to register that domain 10 years ago, he's been paying registration all these years, there is no reason why you should have more rights to that domain than he has.

You can drop me an e-mail with details about the situation and I could take a look at it, give you some good advice.

Normally you would try to stick with .com whenever possible, but if the .net was a pretty good deal, it's not the end of the world to build on the .net. Let's face it - Porn.net is better than 99.9999% of adult .com domains and if a serious player in adult owned it and instead considered building a network around a much worse .com, they'd be fucking stupid. The same could be said for the $x,xxx level of domains - if you can get a really nice .net for the money, I say why not? Yea the .com will gain value and will get some of your traffic, but you'll be getting a considerably more elite name than you would in .com for the same money.

Oh, and I second Pradaboy's rant...what you described is Reverse Domain Name Hijacking and is an atrocious practice that should be eradicated. Big corporations are unfortunately sometimes successful with due to the ridiculous legal teams they have and have gone so far as to completely and utterly bully people off names (read up on the war Nissan has waged against the owner of Nissan.com sometime - Nissan should be fucking ashamed of themselves over that whole mess). You can actually get found for RDNH if you decided to try that tactic. I haven't read up on it enough but at the very least I'm sure you'd be liable for the .com owner's legal fees in defending the UDRP etc.