In a post tonight Inc.com asks Do you Really Need A .Com?
“If you’ve started a business any time in the last 15 to 20 years, you’ve probably struggled with the same issue. There’s the-name-you-wish-you-could-have.com but you can’t have it because someone else already does. There’s the-stupidly-long-name-no-one-will-remember.com but no one will remember it. Or, there’s the-weird-made-up-word-no-one-grabbed-yet.com. ”
“That last category is what gave us Qwikster and other horrible company names, and it seems to be the less-than-ideal solution most young companies settle for.”
“There has to be a better way.”
“It’s time to give up the notion that every respectable business must have “.com” at the end of its domain. ”
“Not using .com can seem like business suicide to me and others who’ve spent decades around the Web… but times are changing and, like everything else about the Internet, what we thought we knew turns out not to be so true after all.”
The article goes on to quote Juan Diego Calle, founder of .CO goes on to cite the best reasons for not going with a .com
You can get the domain name you want.
It won’t hurt your search ranking.
The top search engines, including Google with its huge market dominance, are reportedly adjusting their algorithms so that the new domain extensions won’t be penalized. They claim that websites with the new extensions will rank just as well as the more traditional ones, depending on all the things they usually measure, such as inbound links, fresh content, page titles, and so on.
You’ll get a lot more for your money.
That’s the real attraction of non .com domain names. With traditional extensions, once you register your domain, you won’t hear from them again until it’s time to renew. Not so with .co and perhaps other domains as well. Extensions such as .restaurant might naturally bring you into a community of others who do what you do. And the domain itself may come with some extra perks.”"
I know the article is going to cause a big reaction for domain investors and lets not forget I own some 75,000 domain names.
I agree its a simplistic approach to domain names, but with the coming new gTLD’s your certain to see more and more such articles regardless of what you think about this argument people lets call them potential customers of your .com will be reading and reacting.…
