> YC startups are abandoning .com<p>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!<p>.com will always be king
Bingo. either you bough a .com a while ago or you have to pay a lot.<p>A while ago we had the .ly domains. Now .ai. Things change depending on "fashion" if you can call it that.
Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded.
Maybe. Still wild to find startups getting millions can’t afford to buy a .com domain
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.
I would assume that for most <i>foo.ai</i> domains, <i>foo-ai.com</i> would also be available. So it’s more about naming preferences, and sometimes lack of imagination for coming up with an available name.
The squatters really jack up the prices. Yet somehow they pay pennies to squat on domains for decades. It's really a scandal.
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?<p>I kind of like the idea to use .com for the marketing site, and .app for the actual web-app.
.com is evergreen but it's more and more difficult to get good .com names<p>I wouldn't call this 'abandoning .com' though<p>it's basically still .com dominated with a good chunk .ai<p>and I guess the ones with good .com are keeping the .com
If you take .ai out of it, .com is still dominant.
Exactly, and nothing will ever match the "prestige" of .com<p>.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.<p>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.
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.<p>I remember .ly was a thing for a while, then the tech companies would do *ly.com instead.
.ai is the new .io but nothing will beat .com. Even Paul Graham has said that.
.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.
They will certainly buy the .com once they reach a certain level of stability.
I thought .dev and .app would be more popular actually. The rapid increase in .ai makes sense though.
"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."<p><a href="https://x.com/paulg/status/2083628660708561075" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/paulg/status/2083628660708561075</a><p>Was that a .xyz?
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
.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.
At the end of the day, .com will still remain the most valuable and all startups will grow up into buying a .com
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Anything other than a .com for a commercial site screams gimmick and immediately strips away most of its credibility. Go .com or go home.