What happened to .c o m domain names?
Is it me or most of the . com domains have vanished. Just 4 years ago when I was making sites I could easily buy a domain for less than $10. Today, I feel like squatters have taken over and reserved every name that you can imagine. Most of the one-word domains are parked, unused, waiting for the highest bidders for thousands of dollars. This is frustrating for people working on the next big idea, trying to actually use these domains for a purpose. Just my two cents ... :(
It sure is frustrating. This is the "late adopter" tax. everything gets squatted if people think it's future value is worth more than it's present value. The worst part is, the sites aren't functional when they are squatted.
The upside is that I've seen a number of businesses acquire an improved domain (at a premium) when their business succeeds, but at the time, the value of the better domain is worth more to the business and similarly not as hard to justify paying for.
Regardless of any technical or perception issues, domain squatting is just a shitty thing to do and should be illegal. IDK how to go about enforcing a law against it tho and even if we tried there'd still be people finding loopholes to get around it. So I guess whatever.
But if you're a domain squatter, you are a greedy asshole.
It's not the domain that matters now, it's Google, and most of the time they will pick Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Twitter and a host of other sites that rake in money without paying their contributers. Their policy of privileging the already high-traffic via double plus good for backlinks is directly intended to entrench privilege and destroys meritocracy on the internet. Focusing rage on domain squatters isn't the right battle, imo.
I recently moved back to New York, and while looking for a suitable, available apartment I couldn't help but have some of the same thoughts. I feel like squatters have taken over, there are so many beautiful buildings that are sitting empty. There are so many empty storefronts too! I had an idea for a business, and I just know the business would do so great if only I could just grab one of those storefronts from the damn squatters. Tens of thousands of dollars a MONTH. Who do they think they are?
That's really not the same thing because 1.) those are legitimate businesses and 2.) they didn't get those spots for basically free just by showing up first. They had to invest real money that they could potentially lose if the business doesn't work. They could even lose money on the land itself if property values go down. Land speculation and domain squatting are not at all equivalent.
Would you consider GoDaddy a legitimate business?
Well let me tell you, GoDaddy, as well as selling you domain names "at cost", also is in the business of holding a domain portfolio of hundreds of thousands of domain names they don't use. Is that squatting now, or a legitimate business?
If it's a legitimate business, then how is that any different from one guy sitting at a desk coming up with many potential variations of domain names and spending (risking) their own money in registering something that may or may not eventually have any value?
When you look at a domain name you see as "squatted", all you think is - god damn it, if only this sucker didn't squat on it, I could have it for $8. That is... absurdly unrealistic.
At least under capitalism.
The reason someone is asking you $3000 for a domain name isn't because they're trying to make $2992 in profit, it's because they are running a business where they may have 1000 domain names that cost $8-$15 a year to hold and they may only sell 5-10 in any given year.
It's a business model you may disagree with, just like I disagree with real estate developers holding vacant of thousands of units in a city that has of thousands of homeless people.
But, unlike with housing, thankfully you have millions of options to build your own digital home at basically no cost, with a little creativity.
GoDaddy is a very shady business and a business I don't do business with. That they have a working business model is beside the point. You compared it to land speculation. I was merely pointing out that it's not an accurate comparison. Domain squatting is more like hoarding than investing.
I read some comments here. And I'm totally on @davidkebo and @Primer side
When I start a business, purchase a domain. It's suppose to be fun and easy
I don't really care the DNS, SEO bla bla bla...
You can always be creative on your business name and domain name. And there's so many ways to grow a business regardless of what TLD you own.
I WILL NOT READ a report to explain why a .com is better or not. I would rather spend time on growing my business
Just to throw some strong examples
notion .SO
bubble .IO
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Gone are the days when you would find a couple of suitable words to provide the most apt description of your product. Brainstorming a name and finding an available .com domain is altogether a new set of problem when you think of a new idea.
After spending months in figuring out perfect names for our products we use extra "ss" for our products. Some of our products are as follows:
Draftss.com
Prospectss.com
Illustrationss.com
Artworkss.com
Codingss.com
I agree with you, many of the domains are long gone :( but the good news is that .app, .io, .co domains are catching up in the tech world I feel.
The .co TLD suffers from a strong tendency to be confused with .com. Which is only an inconvenience when trying to get to the website but a real problem when you have an email address at that domain and it's important that people be able to reach you.
I agree with you, but even those are starting to get squatted. So frustrating.
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I disagree. Having a .com is still important. Read this study made by @kyle_byers.
Thanks for sharing this. I think there is still some value but not as big as it used to be: people search mostly on Google for names. The advantage is that when we use "orgpad.com" anywhere in the text or in print, it is obvious for everyone that it is our address. If we would want to use, say, orgpad.io, we would have to write it as http://orgpad.io or www.orgpad.io, both much longer.
We have bought our domain OrgPad.com last year for $3000. It was quite expensive but we got used to this name and couldn't come up with any nice alternative, or everything else was taken or even more expensive. I wouldn't want to buy some other TLD to be forced later to pay much more for .com, or to have someone running some fake website on .com. So the alternative would be to come up with much longer name and that was not worth it.
I disagree with you :) .com is not as important as it use to be. Among all my domains (and also among all my peers startup products which are started same time) my non-.com domain is more popular than all others. Proof: Watermark.ink SEO is also not at all an issue any more.
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Imagine that Songbox starts getting a lot of traction. People talk about it and recommend it to their friends. “You have to try Songbox!”
You can bet that 99% of them are going to digit songbox.com in their address bar. And they won’t find you. So many of them will Google you. But you’ll lose some in the process.
This isn’t a problem when you have just a few users. But the moment you become big, that changes. Imagine if AirBnB had a .travel domain how many visitors it would lose just for a misspelled address. And handling a migration when your website has a lot of traffic is no joke especially for SEO.
Anyway I agree with you that for Indie Hackers like us with small projects it’s not a big deal.
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+1
No problem, more .com domains left for me 😂
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Makes sense, I'll give a try to the new TLDs, hopefully, I don't run into DNS issues. I already heard some horror stories about .io DNS resolution.
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