It has been decades since the best domain names in the .COM space have been taken. Half of the internet users worldwide had not been born or were too young to capture a decent .COM. By the time they grew up and they got their turn to open their businesses or begin their online projects, the best .COM domain names had been long gone.

Young users face a harsh reality, invest thousands of dollars, even millions in buying a name or using that money to develop and market their projects. Stick to an OK .COM or find a new domain termination where they can get the best domain name for the least amount of money and use their scare resources to develop and market their ideas.

The upside of this strategy lies in having a premium, memorable domain name that identifies the project, brand and company. The downside is that .COM is synonymous with the Internet and has been so for more than 25 years. The financial crash that burst out back in 2000 was not called the internet bubble, it was called the .COM bubble, that is how entrenched the term .COM is in the top of mind of internet users.

When it comes to domain names, the Internet is not a level playing field. .COM has always had the upper hand in the domain name space and the dominance built 30 years ago has been unchallenged and unregulated. Back in 2010, ICANN, the body that regulates the DNS and therefore the domain names, decided to do something about this dominance and launched the nTLD program (new top level domain). But the program has been a complete failure for three reasons:

1)  The process was so slow, predictable and bureaucratic (ICANN is one grand global bureaucracy) that it gave Verisign (the owners of .com) ample time to prepare and solidify its position and dominance

2) ICANN was supposed to assure that all domains have the same acceptance and functionality and that is not the case. ICANN has failed miserably at something called UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE and hence technologically, a .COM is very superior than any nTLD with a couple of exceptions (.xyz and .online)

3) The domain industry is plagued with monopolies and monopolistic practices that make it a very hard space to thrive

As a result, since the first new TLD was launched in 2013, there are 37.5 million new domains created in these more than 1121 terminations while in the same period, the stock of .COM domain names has grown by almost double. And no wonder that is the case, in whatsapp, one one types go.com, the app automatically creates a clickable link. Owners of .BUY, a new TLD’s must add the prefix https:// or www. to go.buy to obtain the same result.

So choosing a novel domain name has it’s risks but also its rewards, the most important rewards are cost and availability. Here’s an example, Scoobe.com sells in GoDaddy for $5,000 dollars. Scoobe.Shop sells for $1.49. If anyone wants to open an online store called scoobe and chooses the .SHOP termination, he can destine the $5,000 dollars he would have paid for the domain to develop and market a better product.

If you are creating a video project, you should consider .TUBE domain names and bet on .TUBE becoming the .COM of the age of Video. TUBE has everything to become such an asset, the name is cool, slick, sounds great, matches with almost any word to the left of the dot and finally, it’s recognized throughout the world as the slang for Video. And .TUBE domains are priced very reasonably, for instance the domain magazine.com is not even available. Whoever owns the domain (information is secret) is a large corporation, probably fortune 500, that will never let go of this name that was created in 1993, more than 30 years ago. So if your project is an online magazine that includes videos, Magazine.Tube can be bought for just 99 dollars.

This is the truth about domain names more than a decade into the launch of the new TLD program. A .COM that ceased to be the standard to become the “Gold standard” and the rest of the domain name terminations, competing for the crumbles of .COM, capturing those who were unable to get the domain they wanted. So if you can’t get a decent .COM domain name, it’s not your fault, that is the way the system is set up and the way it will continue. But this dominance will be broken eventually and when that happens, you will be glad you secured the best name in the new domain space.