Hacker News Reader

Comment by crabasa | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing that in the age of Google Search that anyone places any value on the TLD for a domain. Browser vendors have run dozens of studies that indicate that most people do not enter fully qualified domains in the address bar, which is why all address bars are wired into a search provider.

I feel like the the explosion of TLDs is a very thinly veiled money grab aimed at exploiting two groups of people:

1) Trademark owners

2) Unsophisticated internet marketers

View on HN

Disagree:

When we first launched Sync we had to settle with "Sync.us" due to all other TLDs were taken. We forced ourselves to love the name. We printed "Sync For Us" on all our t-shirts and swag. We thought it was an awesome way to capitalize on the TLD. Sync Us .. Sync Us ... Sync Us ....

Boy, were we ever wrong! At some point the powers that be (Nokia I think) put Sync.com up for auction.

We stumbled on it quite accidentally, one of our developers landed on the auction page while trying to get to our own website. This little irony itself highlights the value of the TLD.

So we paid a small fortune and rebranded our company from Sync.us to Sync.com.

This turned out to be a game changer for Sync. Everything came into focus. People could more easily remember us, and find us. We gained credibility. Traffic to our website increased dramatically, as did signups.

Our initial TLD decision held us back.

Is .blog a good TLD? For WordPress users it just might be.

TLDs give a business credibility. People are much more likely to shop at foo.com than foo.info.

But foo isn't buying '.foo' or foo.blog. I don't see how credibility is related to the new TLDs.

people are just as likely to click foo.co.m.ru too

use whatever money you were going to use on a TLD and use it on your facebook adspend, nobody is typing in addresses anymore.

Much fun building a brand with foo.co.m.ru

Throw in a 'u' after the 'm' and foocomuru is far from the worst brand name I've heard.

"Where does the dots go again?"

ha! Flashbacks to bookmarking in 2003

Look at my username so you know my answer is legit. The umlaut goes over a consonant.

Seriously though, I don't know how anyone names a business anymore and manages to get a reasonably relevant .com domain name. At some point we gotta give up and use these other TLDs.

Reminds me of cs.rin.ru [1]

[1] http://cs.rin.ru/forum

The question is if people are more likely to visit foo.blog than blog.foo.com. I don't think that is the case.

OTOH, having the ".blog" TLD allows you to start a blogging website (like Medium), and hand out domain names to your clients.

... Which literally describes why Automattic bought it. They own Wordpress.

I'd argue that a TLD can add semantic meaning to a website's domain name in a more general way than what would be possible by using subdomains, and without the clutter of using /paths/to/sections/and/pages.

It is not about directly entering, it is about search results and yes you still get to work to rank them better.

It still matters for email addresses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com