Ask HN: How bad is the penalty/stigma for 'non-standard' TLDs?
Penalty meaning anything that causes loss of traffic, revenue, trust, brand.
(a) Brand new extensions - it will depend on whether Google considers the specific tld as a global tld (like it does for .io and .co). If so, then ranking in the search results may not be a problem.
(b) Global extensions like .io, .co - there are ample examples of startups that have used an "io", "co" or "ly" domain extensions. customer.io, intercom.io - startups are better of buying a $50 domains name, than spending hundred of thousands of dollars on getting the .com version of a popular word.
Traffic Penalty: There will be some loss from type-in traffic. But people have been posting domain names directly in the search engines, so its likely that type in traffic has decreased substantially. I see this as not being important in the future.
Trust & Brand Penalties: If the customers are not early adopters, then there might be a trust penalty as very few people have even heard of the new domain extensions.
Thank you, I had not considered the 'global' consequences which are important to me because I think most of my traffic will be arriving from long tail search