My gut feeling is: .com (or co.) / .org / .net are still going to be the go-to-TLD for a long while whereas the .live, .tv and others will establish as "satellite" TLDs to assist the main TLD for marketing purposes or particular events carrying the same brand name. We'll see...

It fights domain squatting. Can't afford your domain? Get it on a different TLD.

Fundamentally it's a sign that consumers are becoming comfortable with weird tlds. Mostly becuase they just click the link and don't really care what the domain is.

@alexanderkluge @swizec Yeah, that's exactly my feeling. Like .com/.co/.net/.org (and .io/.me...) are the "normative" thing to do and that's still such a powerful thing inside people's heads. But as everything becomes more and more digital (and there's just that – a link to click) I'm surprised as why no major player and/or successful mass-market startup hasn't fully adopted a new TLD as their main domain yet. I'd love to see things like google.tech or tinder.social. Trying to come up with a project naming that fits both the .com and the naming purposes is becoming ridiculous (downloadAPPNAMEnow.com and such). If anyone knows of a successful "big" thing with a weird TLD (apart, from, you know, wip.chat :P), I'd love to hear about it! :)

I think the answer is doing both, thedomain.hack (because it's shorter and better) and thedomainhack.com. As an aside, I've encountered some people who don't realize that domains exist outside of .com, so it's thrown them off when they want to email me on one of my non-dotcom domains.

I expected that the new TLDs would cause a lot of confusion for people but I've not noticed any issues so far. Our domain is .work but even people who aren't that tech savvy haven't had problems visiting our website or emailing me, after I've told them what the URL is

@marsh931 that's precisely my main concern, it's awesome knowing that it's not actually a problem with real customers. Thanks for sharing! :)

The main reason is Google. .com and .org still rank better than less established alternatives.

The standard example for an alternative domain is .info. A website with a .info domain is harder to get to the first page of Google. The reason here is that .info domains are cheaper and can be registered anonymously. That's why many spammers and hackers use them, and that's why a .info domain is a negative ranking factor.

If you want to appear at the top of the search results at Google for some keyword, e.g. your brand name, it's a huge plus to use "yourbrandand.com".

@jakobsch wow, I didn't know about this! Thanks! Is this covered in any official resource? I mean, I can see intuitively that it has to be true – the .info reasoning seems very logical. But I wonder if Google or any SEO reputable sources have covered this. That said, I guess if your site is not fraudulent and your content is good and valuable the site will end up ranking first positions anyways

Regarding examples of alternative domains have a look at karma.life/en/ (which is where I work). We have the .life as our main one and it works great.
Only problem has been when telling ones email address in like a phone call. As others have said people don’t get domains outside the usual suspects.

@jakobsch A year or two back I did some research using Semrush and found plenty of exact match .infos still ranking in the US and elsewhere. There are some quirks too - like I think I recall .biz is particularly popular in Germany?

Personally I have a .me, a .click, a .today, and a .company all ranking top 10 for various competitive commercial terms (eg 5-10k searches/mo, >$3 CPC)

That said for a serious app type project I would aim for a .com or perhaps .org if it was non profit.

For quick tests and projects where I don't know if I still will be focusing on it next year I'll buy any old $0.88 domain from Namecheap that roughly fits my site, with a view to upgrading later if it works out, or just dropping it if it fails.

Always good to be aware too that aside from the hacking angle even some of the TLDs favoured by makers are pretty poorly run: www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07…