

Ask YC: What do you think of a .net domain? - maxklein

I just saw that Radar (http://radar.net/) uses a .net domain and does not own the corresponding .com domain. What is the general opinion on this? Is there a negative value associated with operating from a .net domain? Are most successful startups built on .com?
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astrec
No doubt they'd love to own the .com, but generic name like that would be
worth a fortune, and acquiring it would be a massive distraction.

Does it matter? I'll give you some real figures from one of our non .coms
which is branded "ourdomain.tld"

All figures from Jul 27 - Aug 26.

    
    
      Total Visits: 4,702,217
    
      Type ins: 2,214,766 (47.10%)
      Google (organic): 926,313 (19.7%)
      Google (CPC): 390,382 (8.30%)
    

And then a very long tail featuring Yahoo (2%), Live (0.6%) and 1000s more.

Now for the interesting bit - of the keywords for those Google referrals:

    
    
      38% were for our brand name without TLD e.g ourdomain (in other words, "radar")
      33% were for a variant of our domain name e.g. ourdomain.tld, www.ourdomain.tld, ourdomain.ccTld etc.
    

So again, does it matter?

Obviously this is only data for one site so it's impossible to say anything
conclusive, but my feeling is that by building a strong brand around the
domain you own it doesn't matter too much whether it's a .net .

~~~
maxklein
So half of all users typed in the domain, even though it was not the .com?
That's quite high. What's your firefox user percentage as a way to cross
reference (an informal test for geekiness)?

~~~
astrec

      MSIE: 78.10%
      Firefox: 16.92%
      Safari: 3.84%
      Opera: 0.55%
    

Now I think about it, although _type-ins_ is convenient marketing/analytics
speak - and it's the label for that field in the report - it's a bit
misleading as the total would include bookmarks.

~~~
maxklein
That's good news then, as that's a very non-geeky audience.

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cellis
Don't settle for a .net domain. Just come up with a name. Ideally it should be
one or two words and actually mean something.

    
    
      Youtube
      stubhub
      priceline
    
    

If you can't do that, think of spelling it wrong--

    
    
      google
      kongregate
      flickr
    

or a portmanteau

    
    
      startuply
    

Those are just names off the top of my head. There are tons of ways to avoid
the subpar .net domain

~~~
maxklein
What about if I have a common word that is quite recognizable, but only own
the .net version?

~~~
cosmo7
Common words are useless for product names; you can't google for them.

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softbuilder
This is the first time I've seen so many respond and no one is right. Your url
is unimportant. Stop wasting brain cycles on it. If you've built something
valuable it could be buried in the bowels of tripod or geocities and people
will find it. Most of the time when I hear about a site these days, I hear the
name, not the url. This has been increasing as companies get more desperate
for urls and there's a cleverness war (slap-fight really). I google the name
(delicious => del.icio.us, first link) or keywords that I remember get me what
I want ('inflation calculator' => westegg).

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babul
The reality is the best .com (and .net/.org/.tv/etc.) names have long gone.
Short of being lucky with a droplist or in the domain aftermarket, you will
not get a good one without $$$.

Work with what you have. Build value. Build a brand. The name will not matter
as much as the product. If the product is good, people will remember the name,
no matter how bad.

Lastly, one good thing about the lack of common names is it forces you to be
creative. Perhaps startups should not seek common names or phrases. You want a
brand name. Something you can trademark. Something memorable (the way flickr
and del.icio.us force memorisation). Something that does not bring up too many
unrelated hits in Google (you can dominate for the term, can promote it for
cheap due to less AdWord competition, etc. etc.).

~~~
groovyone
I (respectfully) don't agree with the fact that all the .com names have gone,
but I do agree with creating a brand name. I've registered some great names
after doing some serious searching. We created a domain name finding tool to
mix and match names and one that does mix and match stuff with vowels and
consonants. In addition, we've also purchased some .coms for reasonable money
(hundreds of dollars, but not into the thousands) that have definitely been
worth it and are memorable.

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makecheck
I believe that users are still confused by the fact that company.com may not
be the same as company.net, so it's good to hold the .com domain. Fortunately,
these days people seem to Google what they want or use auto-completing
browsers, which make specific domains a little less important.

There's also the practice of using .com for the public site and .net for the
company intranet, which can be nice for making it obvious what's protected
behind the firewall.

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FiReaNG3L
I own biology.net and I'm developing it very soon; right now it redirects to
my other site, biologynews.net, which is #1 for "biology news" on all major
search engines. Sure the .com would have been better, but I dont have a
million dollar :)

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noodle
.com is the standard.

.net is fine, just make sure to brand and market yourself well. for example,
don't refer to yourself in promo materials as "mystartup" -- use
"mystartup.net".

i can think of quite a few successful .net companies. the .net won't preclude
your success. a .com name will just act as a crutch for the mainstream
audience if you want to tap that market.

~~~
maxklein
Most .net companies have something to do with a network, no?

~~~
noodle
some, yes. that was the intent of the domain name.

but that would be like saying that all the .tv domains are sites based in
tuvalu.

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ComputerGuru
For what it's worth: we're .net with loads of traffic (15MM+ per month), been
around for 4 years now, and never had any problem with the fact that the .com
isn't ours.

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krschultz
Despite all the negative comments to the contrary, we are having no trouble
with a .net name. (buglabs.net), little if any confusion arises. It probably
helps that there is just a squatter on buglabs.com, but it is true most of our
traffic comes from google and we show up as #1, I don't think buglabs.com ever
shows up

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Hoff
Ignoring the impending TLD explosion, all of the good domain names are long
gone. And regardless of what you pick, Google is and will remain the front
door to your web site; the domain name is now effective largely only for
bookmarking, for DNS-level load balancing, and to allow you to survive an IP
address change.

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adrianwaj
.net is for IT infrastructural plays and .com is for commercial consumer
plays. Stick to the formal reasoning behind the creation of each.

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raghus
photo.net seems to be doing pretty well

