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Bypass a costly domain
You want a domain? Maybe you are with a startup and it needs a domain. So you go to (eg) GoDaddy.com and see if someone already has a dot com domain that you are after. If not, great! You buy it from GoDaddy for about $US12 to register it. In a year’s time, if you want to renew, the fee is also around $12/year.
The problem is that the dot com Top Level Domain (TLD) is the most popular, with about 110 million domains. This is the after effect of the dot com years 95–2000, when people gravitated to dot com domains as epitomising desirable domains. Today there are 1000 TLDs! No shortage of domains for you to pick. Why so many TLDs? One reason is there is a shortage of desirable unowned dot com domains — those with 1 English dictionary word. Speculators snarfed these up. If you want 1 of these domains, the owner might ask $10,000. Sometimes much more. Yikes!
To address this was 1 reason for the new TLDs. If you cannot afford reason.com, maybe no one owns reason.mobile or reason.info so you get those for the default (low) price.
Especially if you are a startup with little cash, what can you do? Go to a non dot com TLD, or maybe pick a name and, if it is a dictionary word, deliberately misspell it. So we ended up with Tumblr.com, Fiverr.com.
This is not so great if you already incorporated your startup as fiver. Another concern is…
