
Ask HN: How bad is the penalty/stigma for 'non-standard' TLDs? - whistlerbrk
Penalty meaning anything that causes loss of traffic, revenue, trust, brand.
======
spocked
By 'non standard', do you mean the new ones like .club, .online, .global or
just any extensions that are not .com, .org or .net?

(a) Brand new extensions - it will depend on whether Google considers the
specific tld as a global tld (like it does for .io and .co). If so, then
ranking in the search results may not be a problem.

(b) Global extensions like .io, .co - there are ample examples of startups
that have used an "io", "co" or "ly" domain extensions. customer.io,
intercom.io - startups are better of buying a $50 domains name, than spending
hundred of thousands of dollars on getting the .com version of a popular word.

Traffic Penalty: There will be some loss from type-in traffic. But people have
been posting domain names directly in the search engines, so its likely that
type in traffic has decreased substantially. I see this as not being important
in the future.

Trust & Brand Penalties: If the customers are not early adopters, then there
might be a trust penalty as very few people have even heard of the new domain
extensions.

~~~
whistlerbrk
Yes, and I'm considering getting a .online TLD vs paying thousands to a
squatter vs buying a .org that isn't as good.

Thank you, I had not considered the 'global' consequences which are important
to me because I think most of my traffic will be arriving from long tail
search

------
kelukelugames
I made [http://www.ridetheravi.horse](http://www.ridetheravi.horse) as a joke
to help my friend meet women. Hasn't really caught on.

