I think this is honestly less about the notoriety of .com, and more about the lack of affordable and available domains for startups to purchase. Got a five letter named startup? That’ll cost you tens of thousands of dollars, IF you can even get it. Meanwhile there’s hundreds of gTLDs that you can buy a domain on for $10-$30/yr.

When I started my YC company, we used the .io (which we found on HN, actually! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6397526). A few years later, once we could afford it, we bought the .com for $170k.

I imagine that if you filtered based on only companies that make it to (for example) a Series B, the % goes way up.

From my perspective as a user, maybe someone who would visit your domain, I’m indifferent to the specific TLD used. You might be able to compose a clever word that grabs my attention, which I’ve seen a lot from .ly domains.

However, from an email marketing perspective, TLDs are not interchangeable. Some TLDs (think .xyz) see a lot of abuse, tanking the reputation and deliverability for good actors using them too.

So my advice is to stick with TLDs that most good actors are using (.com, .io), giving you better baseline deliverability, because email marketing remains incredibly valuable for growth.

IMO the biggest problem with anything that's not a .com is the registry owners. As a registrant I want low (or at least consistent) prices, minimal price increases, and an assurance the TLD is going to be around long term.

The registries constantly adjust pricing and the new registrant agreements aren't as good as the old ones (ex: no price caps). The registry operators probably think they're geniuses that are maximizing profits via price discrimination, but I think they're fools that don't understand their product or the target audience.

I don't care too much about premium pricing. It's the *fluctuating* pricing without any limits that turns me off. If shortsighted management ruins a TLD and it collapses, I don't want to be collateral damage. I know there's a bond to cover operations for a period of time, but that's not forever.

This is a good thing IMO. There are hundreds of great TLDs [1] just sitting there that can help ease the gold rush and squatting problem with .com domains, but are not favored because historically non-.com websites have been associated with scams and low effort content rather than established brands. Hopefully more and more legit startups out there with a .horse their name will finally normalize such domains.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...

This .com=serious shtick is laughable, your fomo tricks have no power here. So why would I get a .com? Nobody even types the full domain anymore. People search and click. But the number one reason is I refuse to feed the squatters.

People used to spend hours to customize their phone backgrounds and desktop backgrounds and myspace profiles, then came the big guys and now everyone uses the defaults and all webpages look alike.

Getting a non-.com domain is like that, it seems amateurish and somewhat unprofessional. There are .com domains if one is willing to be creative and settle for something that is not a simple dictionary word . The length doesnt matter as long as the word is reasonably memorable. 'facebook' and 'instagram' and 'snapchat' did not have a problem with their name. If they 'd gone for face.book, instagr.am snap.chat etc people would be confused "how do i access this site". The dot is not part of our mental dictionary.

Some of them look even dangerous. for example MS onedrive links are from "1drv.ms " which makes my emails look like phishing scams.

Related, PG’s “Change Your Name”

http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

.com domain availability has dried up and alternate TLDs dropped the price of squatted .coms. .io was too popular for a while and now everyone seems to be going with a .ai even if their product is far from actual AI. For my startup, I went with .dev. Don’t know if that was a good idea, but I was able to readily get a simple three-letter TLD there.

In addition to the price issue folks have mentioned, I also think it's less important to have a .com if your product isn't consumer end-user focused. E.g. if you're selling to developers or other businesses things like .io or .ai are fine. My guess is that .com is still important if you are selling something direct to consumer.

More than half of YC startups don’t have a dot com for the same reason people aren’t building new homes on Manhattan island - there’s no empty space and buying existing desirable space is unnecessarily expensive.

I think that the fact that every possible .com is probably already taken has played a big role in this. On top of taht, who types in the domain name? You either go to search engine, click the link somewhere, scan QR code.

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" as William Shakespeare has written could be said today "A startup can have any domain name and it would still be the same".

Entrepreneur Pieter Levels posted a before / after screenshot of his traffic after switching from .io to .com. It's quite the jump!

https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/14722048099817594...

There's an old game fan site that had an unpronounceable five letter dot com. I made a lowball offer and since then Unregistry has periodically tried to sell me this expensive domain to me, including by setting up a fake site temporarily to make it look like it was in use.

I picked up/resold a lot of expiring domains in 2008 when people couldn't hold on to them/stopped speculating. Made around $30K off some scripts that took expiring domains and parsed english words, grabbed the number of return results for those words in Google as well as cost per click and some other mojo to determine potential worth, pick up the decent ones and send emails to relevant companies. I'm no longer that scummy but I wonder if there will be an upturn of lapsed domain renewals this downturn? I'm guessing there's a ton of competition now (even from the Registrars) as even then I think a lot passed through Godaddy auctions or some such before dropping of.

I'm in the domain industry (created a tool called Newsy - https://www.newsy.co) and this is where the domainers take the opportunistic sales to established companies who can buy their .com domains they've been holding on for so long.

You may not like domain parking industry, but for people who have decent set of .com domain names and many of them generate thousands of dollars through just ad-clicking, it's an absolute no-brainer to continue on with this trade and they will always say "it's an investment" and "it's like real estate".

What users even look at a domain, much less worry if it's a .COM, anymore? In the age of apps and abhorrently priced .COM domains, it seems to me that a new company with a relatively low amount of startup cash shouldn't choose to do something as idiotic as "investing" tons of cash in a domain name. Just buy a .gg or .co/ etc and get over it. If you're successful, and when you have the cash, then go wasting money on stuff like that. Not all of us have billions donated from large companies to spend on domains.. cough cough

We bought our .com after we became "successful" and had significant revenue, however it just redirects to our non-dot-com, because it's too much of a hassle and SEO risk to change at this point.

> 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another. [1]

I wonder what the updated figures would be.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

YC also mentioned more of the cohort being from outside the United States, which would mean a higher proportion of regional domain names.

I found it to be really a helpful piece of info. If I only had access to it a year ago when I AskHN-ed [0] regarding this same matter.

In the end, I ended up purchasing the corresponding names in .io and .app when still available.

[0]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758152

I wonder if it would have been seen as a sign of prestige for startups if yc had become a domain provider for .yc

AKA .com's are too expensive. Next.

Manhattan's overpriced. People are moving to Brooklyn.

My concern would be email deliverability for less popular TLDs, although I imagine it's not an issue for the more popular alternatives like .io and .ai