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 .

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)?

  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.

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

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

I agree on this. Think of creating a 'brand' if you can. It will work out better in the long run

Exactly. That's what Sed Gothin wrote in his article The New Rules Of Naming:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/10/the_new_rule...

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

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

I would go for it (advertising only as the complete yourdomain).net, but you're still setting your users up for confusion. Think of the average 13 year old myspacer, or 50 year old mom. Not everyone has a photographic memory like you.

They will forget the extension, but remember the name and be surprised with a nasty link-squatter or worse.

What about if my target is a geeky crowd?

what if what if what if Tell us the name already

Not yet :)

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).

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.).

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.

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.

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 :)

.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.

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

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.

That is how it used to be but it isn't any longer. .Net is now the go to for any commercial company who can't get the .com -- I think most people are okay with it but if the branding doesn't strongly include .net then the .com will get a lot of the traffic.

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.

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

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.

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

photo.net seems to be doing pretty well