Using ‘.tech’ or ‘.flights’ or .sports’ for your site feels too “on the nose” and gives vibes of like browsing some directory where things are categorised and sorted. Even worse it implies there are other sites under the same category, and those other sites may be competitors, and this dilutes strength of brand.
lt also suggests strongly what the business does, and while that might seem desirable at first it actually isn’t from a corporate perspective because it means the company becomes tied to their business area and can’t expand and grow out of it into other things.
I think this is a major part of why descriptive TLDs continue to be less preferred over ‘meaningless’ two letter TLDs, because companies want the focus to be on the main part of the domain, not the TLD.
I know someone who has a company with the word “technology” in the name, like “Smith Technology”. They use .technology because it’s literally the name of the company, which I think is good for the brand identity, but have run into issues where people just don’t think it’s a correct url because “smith.technology” looks like it’s missing its TLD.
Haha yeah. People are so accustomed to short TLDs that ‘smith.technology’ just intuitively feels kinda wrong, and it still feels that way to me, even as a tech person who knows it is perfectly valid.
You’re thinking like “smith dot technology dot what?”
Some of them can also seem very gimmicky. “.biz” is particularly bad, as I think of it more alluding to showbiz instead of business. They should have made it “.bus” instead, it would have at least appeared more professional.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, this is just a very American marketing approach. Like, why would a tech company want to grow out of the tech sector? Oh right, never ending quarter over quarter growth…
The wild part to me is that the average person doesn’t even know what IO means in a tech context, but enough tech companies have used .io for normies to be conditioned into associating .io with tech
Another reason is brand identity.
Using ‘.tech’ or ‘.flights’ or .sports’ for your site feels too “on the nose” and gives vibes of like browsing some directory where things are categorised and sorted. Even worse it implies there are other sites under the same category, and those other sites may be competitors, and this dilutes strength of brand.
lt also suggests strongly what the business does, and while that might seem desirable at first it actually isn’t from a corporate perspective because it means the company becomes tied to their business area and can’t expand and grow out of it into other things.
I think this is a major part of why descriptive TLDs continue to be less preferred over ‘meaningless’ two letter TLDs, because companies want the focus to be on the main part of the domain, not the TLD.
I know someone who has a company with the word “technology” in the name, like “Smith Technology”. They use .technology because it’s literally the name of the company, which I think is good for the brand identity, but have run into issues where people just don’t think it’s a correct url because “smith.technology” looks like it’s missing its TLD.
Haha yeah. People are so accustomed to short TLDs that ‘smith.technology’ just intuitively feels kinda wrong, and it still feels that way to me, even as a tech person who knows it is perfectly valid.
You’re thinking like “smith dot technology dot what?”
Some of them can also seem very gimmicky. “.biz” is particularly bad, as I think of it more alluding to showbiz instead of business. They should have made it “.bus” instead, it would have at least appeared more professional.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, this is just a very American marketing approach. Like, why would a tech company want to grow out of the tech sector? Oh right, never ending quarter over quarter growth…
The wild part to me is that the average person doesn’t even know what IO means in a tech context, but enough tech companies have used .io for normies to be conditioned into associating .io with tech