The .com Problem

There are roughly 360 million registered domain names. The vast majority of them do nothing. They sit on parking pages serving low-quality ads, or in the portfolios of speculators who bought generic words in the 1990s and have been waiting ever since. The domain graveyard is enormous, and retrieving something from it costs money — sometimes a remarkable amount of it.

voice.com sold for $30 million in 2019. insurance.com changed hands for $35.6 million in 2010. These aren't outliers — they're the market rate for the best single-word .com domains, which have become some of the most valuable real estate on the internet. The people who registered them early have no particular reason to sell at a price a startup can afford.

Why .com Still Matters

Every few years someone declares the .com era finished. The arguments are sensible enough: there are hundreds of TLDs available now — .io, .ai, .co, .app, .dev — and plenty of successful companies use them. Linear is linear.app. Many developer tools run on .io without apparent damage to their brands.

But the pull toward owning the .com version of your name doesn't go away, and it isn't nostalgia. When someone hears a name mentioned in a podcast or conversation, they type it with a .com — it's the default assumption baked into decades of internet use. When a .com and a .co both exist for the same word, the .com owner receives free traffic forever from everyone who types the wrong extension. It's a permanent invisible tax on the brand that settled for less.

There's also a trust dimension that shows up clearly in consumer research: .com domains consistently score higher on perceived legitimacy than alternative TLDs, particularly among audiences who aren't deeply technical. For a B2B SaaS tool, a .io might read as deliberate and insider. For anything consumer-facing, it can read as unfinished.

The .io Footnote Worth Knowing

.io became the default TLD for developer tools around 2010 partly because it reads as an abbreviation for "input/output" — a technical term that gave the extension an accidental semantic credibility. The domain is actually the country code for the British Indian Ocean Territory.

In 2024, Britain agreed to transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Islands — the main landmass of the territory — to Mauritius, following decades of legal and political dispute. ICANN's policies on retiring ccTLDs are not automatic, and .io registrations remain valid for now. But the situation is genuinely uncertain in a way that .com's future is not. Startups that built their brand on .io over the past decade are watching this more closely than they'd prefer.

.ai faces a different set of questions. It's the ccTLD for Anguilla, a stable territory that earns significant revenue from domain registrations and has no political complications. The real risk with .ai is semantic — after three years of saturation, a .ai domain now often reads as "we have AI features" rather than "we are a serious company." Branding that tracks a trend ages at the same speed as the trend.

The Hacks That Seem Smart Until They Aren't

The standard workarounds are well known and well worn. Add "get" to the front: getdropbox.com, getpostman.com. Add "try": tryheroku.com. Append "app," "hq," or "api." These have been around since the late 2000s and they work well enough to get a product launched under a real name.

The problem is what they signal over time. "Get" implies the product hasn't claimed its own identity yet — it's the domain equivalent of operating from a coworking space while you wait for your own office. Dropbox launched on getdropbox.com and eventually paid an undisclosed sum to acquire dropbox.com. Stripe launched in 2010 with stripe.com from day one, and the clean, direct domain is part of why the brand has always felt more established than it had any right to at its age.

There is also the misdirection problem. If your product is called Helios and you're at gethelios.com, anyone who types helios.com goes somewhere else. That destination might be a competitor, a cybersquatter, or simply a parked page. None of these outcomes are good, and they continue for as long as you don't own the direct domain — which, once someone else does, may be forever.

The Invented Word Advantage

Here is the practical reality: if you need a clean, memorable .com that you can own at registration cost, an invented word is the most reliable path to it.

A nonsense word that doesn't exist in any language has no registered domain. Spotify had spotify.com before anyone else thought to type it — because no one else would have, since the word didn't exist. The same was true for Etsy, Skype, Kodak, and thousands of smaller brands that took the same approach. In each case, the founders registered their .com on the first attempt, for the standard fee, because the name had no prior owner.

This sounds obvious stated plainly, but it gets overlooked. When you choose an existing word, you are competing for something that already belongs to someone. When you invent a word, you are almost certainly creating something that doesn't yet exist anywhere in the domain registries.

The compound benefit is that you're doing this simultaneously for the trademark, the social handles, and the domain. A word you invented is clean across all three by default, not by luck.

What to Check Before You Register

Getting a clean .com is necessary but not sufficient. Before committing:

Search trademarks before domains

A clean domain search doesn't mean a clean trademark. These are separate systems and a conflicting trademark discovered after you've built a brand on a domain is significantly more expensive to resolve than if you'd found it before registering. The USPTO and EUIPO databases are free to search and take about ten minutes.

Check the name in other languages

Run the word through search engines with regional filters before you fall in love with it. A word that is neutral or invented in English may have an established meaning — or an unfortunate one — in the languages of your target markets. A few hours of checking now is much cheaper than a rebrand later.

Look at the domain's history

If the domain has been registered before and recently expired, check its history on the Wayback Machine and run it through a spam-blacklist checker before registering it. Some previously expired domains carry search-engine penalties from their prior owners. A domain with a history of link farming can suppress your rankings even after the content is gone.

Lock down the social handles at the same time

Register your brand name on the major social platforms the same day you register the domain, even if you don't plan to use them yet. The cost is nothing; the cost of someone else holding your brand name on a platform you later need is real. Brand squatting on social platforms is common, and reclaiming a handle requires either a trademark dispute or a payment to whoever got there first.

The Domain Graveyard Has One Exit

The domain problem is not going to get easier. Every year more names get registered, more expire into speculation portfolios, and the gap between what a founder wants to pay and what a domain broker wants to charge grows wider. Alternative TLDs have expanded the available namespace without replacing the status of .com — they've just given everyone more options for second-best.

The cleanest way out of this has been available since George Eastman named his camera company in 1888: make the word up. A name no one has used can't already belong to someone else. That remains true for domain names today, and it is unlikely to change.