YC startups are abandoning .com

ooyster143 about 5 hours ago 42 commentsRead Article on orangecrumbs.com

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vlucas•about 3 hours ago

> YC startups are abandoning .com

They are not "abandoning" .com domains. They are just really hard to find available or cheap enough to buy, so they launch with something else instead!

.com will always be king

manueltgomes•about 3 hours ago

Bingo. either you bough a .com a while ago or you have to pay a lot.

A while ago we had the .ly domains. Now .ai. Things change depending on "fashion" if you can call it that.

DanielHB•about 3 hours ago

Oh god my company just switched to .io and that was a huge PITA. I hope we don't go .ai...

robin_reala•about 3 hours ago

You just switched to .io knowing that it might be decommissioned in the not-too-distant future?

khy•about 3 hours ago

Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded.

charlieyu1•about 3 hours ago

Maybe. Still wild to find startups getting millions can’t afford to buy a .com domain

jeffyaw•about 3 hours ago

it's not that they can't afford to buy one. it's that they're not available. and now a lot of other tlds have gained traction so it's now reasonable to consider others.

layer8•about 2 hours ago

I would assume that for most foo.ai domains, foo-ai.com would also be available. So it’s more about naming preferences, and sometimes lack of imagination for coming up with an available name.

xhkkffbf•about 3 hours ago

The squatters really jack up the prices. Yet somehow they pay pennies to squat on domains for decades. It's really a scandal.

CodesInChaos•about 3 hours ago

Which gTLDs are reliable besides the classics (com, net, org,...)? By that I mean that the TLD owner won't screw you over a few years from now, for example by raising prices?

I kind of like the idea to use .com for the marketing site, and .app for the actual web-app.

Grombobulous•about 3 hours ago

If you take .ai out of it, .com is still dominant.

mojuba•about 3 hours ago

Exactly, and nothing will ever match the "prestige" of .com

.ai is also kind of cool right now but it will probably lose its appeal after some years when everything will become AI and the world will get tired of the term.

But .com is still at the top of the food chain. If you can survive for a few years, raise your series A/B, you will likely have enough money to acquire your sexy single-word .com name.

charlieyu1•about 3 hours ago

Just found out the great ol’ command.com is taken by somebody random

dhosek•about 3 hours ago

Many of the “good” simple names were grabbed by folks when registration was free in th 90s.

I’m still annoyed that thanks to a missed payment, I lost quixote.com.

the__alchemist•about 3 hours ago

Is non .com/.org, and hyphens still haram? I registered a new domain last week; I went with non-hyphenated .com. More verbose than ideal, but I chose based on my previous understanding.

I remember .ly was a thing for a while, then the tech companies would do *ly.com instead.

tosh•about 3 hours ago

.com is evergreen but it's more and more difficult to get good .com names

I wouldn't call this 'abandoning .com' though

it's basically still .com dominated with a good chunk .ai

and I guess the ones with good .com are keeping the .com

codegeek•about 3 hours ago

.ai is the new .io but nothing will beat .com. Even Paul Graham has said that.

nadis•about 3 hours ago

Lest we forget, the PG essay: https://paulgraham.com/name.html

closetheloopdev•about 3 hours ago

While reading the essay, I could not stop thinking about the literal "X" company which was formerly known as Twitter :D. It's like X is no longer a variable but a constant.

FlamingMoe•about 3 hours ago

They will certainly buy the .com once they reach a certain level of stability.

Cider9986•about 3 hours ago

.st is cool because they allow US-legal content and it's pretty cheap. I don't think it will be popular with companies but I like it for personal sites.

CollinEMac•about 3 hours ago

I thought .dev and .app would be more popular actually. The rapid increase in .ai makes sense though.

405126121•about 3 hours ago

From personal experience .dev is a little weird. For one thing its on the HSTS preload list, enforcing https. You cannot make a http://... request to a .dev domain from most browsers. I found this out the hard way after trying to use .dev for... development.

CodesInChaos•about 3 hours ago

I understand using http on localhost and in some cases local domains accessible within the LAN. But I don't see much point in using http for public domains, especially since browsers apply many restrictions to insecure origins (http://*.localhost is considered secure).

xhkkffbf•about 3 hours ago

That's a deal breaker for me. Who has the time to set up full crypto protocols when just noodling around?

cma•about 3 hours ago

"A recent YC startup spent 250k on a domain. I was slightly shocked. But when I asked how much they raised after YC, the answer was 6.5m. So 1/26 of their round. This is the time we live in; one shocking number counterbalances the other."

https://x.com/paulg/status/2083628660708561075

Was that a .xyz?

cakbeslik•about 3 hours ago

I never thought domains are actually uper important for startups. .com was always cool, then ther was an .io madness, never liked it, still go with .com or .co

jdw64•about 3 hours ago

.com — in RFC 920, it originally meant 'commercial.' But come to think of it, a lot of recent startups seem to be selling things that aren't really commercial at all. So maybe they're actually heading in the right direction.

rvz•about 3 hours ago

At the end of the day, .com will still remain the most valuable and all startups will grow up into buying a .com

benatkin•about 3 hours ago

Counter-example: Alphabet doesn't have alphabet.com

CodesInChaos•about 3 hours ago

They have google.com, which is the brand they use towards customers. The Alphabet brand is little more than a stock ticker.

newleaf•about 2 hours ago

They use abc.xyz though, which is fun at least.

SJMG•about 3 hours ago

They have abc.xyz

philipwhiuk•about 3 hours ago

Counter-counter point: It's not really used in branding either by any of the child companies. So they don't need it.

rvz•about 3 hours ago

Who ever has alphabet.com will be able to sell it for 7 figures anyway, which is the point.

ggcr•about 2 hours ago

TIL that alphabet.com belongs to BMW group

thm•about 3 hours ago

Anything other than a .com for a commercial site screams gimmick and immediately strips away most of its credibility. Go .com or go home.

jeffyaw•about 3 hours ago

this sounds like you're stuck in 2010.

gumby•about 2 hours ago

Nope: it surprised me too, but we did a small survey and unless you’re a nerd, anything not ending in either com or your own nation’s TLD structure is considered dodgy and/or hard to type (.co being a notorious case — people type .com instead).

This is mitigated slightly by the fact that people don’t use URIs much any more and even if they do they usually type something into a search bar or chat bot which DWIMs what they typed anyway.