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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

It must have been nice to have been alive in the early internet where barely any domains were taken.

On the bright side domains have been less relevant since the rise of accessing sites via search engines and the move to mobile apps whose stores don't suffer from the squatting issues.

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They were much more expensive in those days IIRC - today they are the cost of a couple of coffees, those days they were more like 25% the cost of a new computer... per year! It was also quite inaccessible in terms of purchasing - contracts, call our sales team etc. Things like GoDaddy were still either non-existent or very nascent in the mid-late 90s when I was just starting out as a early teen online.

I had dreams as a youngster of owning my own domain name (just one!) and running my own site there... Now I don't even know how many domains I own!

-- in the early 90s you could easily get domains for free - there were many registrars who would give you free .com or .co.uk in return an iframe that advertised the registrar! - this all but disappeared after 1995 =( --

I remember getting a free .co.uk domain name around the year 2000. Can't remember the business model but it was probably similar to the underpant gnomes.

In the mid to late 90s, domains cost $50 per year, and you had to buy the first two years up front, so a domain cost $100. Nowhere near 25% of the cost of a new computer which were much more expensive back then.

In the UK I recall being quoted about £200 a year for a domain (this may have been direct from nominet or non-consumer company for a UK one - as I mentioned the services in the mid-late 90s were less developed and it was harder to just buy online, especially without a credit card which you cannot have in the UK when under 18). Our pentium PC was £899 IIRC.

When I registered my first one (1993 I think) they were free, you also had to get a (free) class C and someone to route to it

The most famous story that I can think of was the one of the Wired journalist that bought mcdonalds.com and that the company didn't seem to care for a while. Eventually said journalist just gave the domain to them in exchange of a $3500 donation to a public school in NY.

> since the rise of accessing sites via search engines

This is worse as now you have to compete with ads (potentially from scammers) and SEO. At least with domains, once you register all the major misspellings for a nominal fee, the problem is resolved. With ads, it's an auction so you're constantly paying a protection racket to the search engine to outbid the malicious actors.

Thanks to domain squatters, the internet businesses have to come up with weird nerdy names like shopify, YouTube, reddit, hooli etc.

It's more than just domain squatting .. a business often wants a fresh name that uniquely searches to their business.

Once upon a time search for songs by The The on youtube was a nightmare, that, at least, has improved.

but if you run a business, don't underestimate the value of a short, and well-named .com

preferably one without hyphens too.

Is there any research on how the quality of domain for a brand affects its key metrics?

Define "key metrics".

Page visits or leads / sales would be the primary ones.

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