Hey buddy, could you spare a .com?

Domain Names - cheaper is better?

If .com domains were computer hardware, they’d be the hard drive.  Wait, before your eyes glaze over, keep reading for some domain name truth.  In all honesty the rest of this article can be summed up with buy .com’s and life will be good.

If you are still reading then imagine a scenario like this:

Hey buddy, could you spare a nickel?   I’ll work for it and store 1,073,741,824 bytes of data for you and give you a penny back.

I got a new camera and took a lot of pictures over the holidays and with each picture about 7MB I need to find a bigger drive to store them.  I headed over to Amazon to get an idea of how much I was going to lay out for a 500GB or maybe a 1TB (a TB is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes or roughly 4.5 million books) drive and was I ever surprised?  To put this in perspective, when I started in the tech industry almost 20 years ago I worked for a company that was the posterchild for collecting massive amounts of data and they had news agencies and press releases and industry pundits clamoring when they hit 1TB of data stored!

Have you seen the price of computer hard drives lately?  Seriously, I figured it up and for well under a nickel, yes $0.05, you can a GB of drive space…  For less than $100 you can get a 2TB hard drive.  I don’t have any hard drive domains, but I seriously don’t see how the manufacturers are making money on these drives…  I’m glad they’re building them though as they will probably hold about 350,000 pictures I take – maybe a couple of them will actually be good.

The point of this post isn’t to push hard drives, but to consider trends.  I know, took a while to get there, but what are the trends driving your industry, domain developments, websites, etc?  If I were looking at hard drives and storage you would think solid state drives were the trend a few years ago and possibly memory cards, or even RAM drives, but even that seems to not matter because the mainstay hard drive is the standard and until something can topple it or render it obsolete don’t count on them going away anytime soon.  Even with the advent of online storage, online backups or whatever the online story of the day is today I can’t see bigger and better hard drives going anywhere!

Now, where does that bring me?  Domain names, of course! 

Everyone knows that .com is THE domain to have.  There are alternatives, pun intended Morgan, and you can buy any of these and be successful;  However, the .com is the cheapest per MU (New term, MegaUsers that I just made up). 

You can develop out a .net, .org, .us, .co, .tv, .biz, .mobi, .cc or whatever you want and the trend is that there are a LOT more extensions coming soon and even more over the next few years and you can use them as well and get a good user base, but the second the person forgets the domain name or just gets in a hurry they’ll type it in with .com and you’ll have lost that MegaUser, maybe for good if the .com is developed! 

The point of the story is that you can, and should, buy and develop other domain extensions because you can get them for cheap, but you should probably flip/sell the site and use the proceeds to buy the .com and bank some or use it to develop more domains.  Or you can buy the .com in the first place if you have the cash because their typo/typein traffic will increase as you develop your domain and once that happens they will want more for the .com domain.  Either way, the .com needs to be recognized for what it is – the biggest, badest domain on the block with the most MU potential for the least amount of money.  I’m personally looking for a PU, but that is a story for another day.

Now get out there and develop some .us’s, sell them and buy some .com domains!

~~ DomainNitro ~~