Five Reasons Domains Are Getting Less Important
While discussing possible names for a product recently, someone asked me if we were at the point where getting the perfect domain name was less important than it used to be. While I'm still a sucker for a clean .com, it does seem less important …
Context & Ripple Effects
The argument lands at the tail end of a decade-long squeeze. As far back as the 2006 Wall Street Journal piece on domain-name scarcity, the good .coms were already gone, pushing founders into creative spellings — the territory the New York Times dubbed a 'Dr. Seuss jumble' in 2007. Naming had become an expensive compromise between memorability and availability.
What changed by mid-2011 was the supply side: ICANN's expansion program put custom suffixes and corporate '.brands' gTLDs on the table, with outlets like the Washington Post tracking the rush in February. Against that backdrop, this post flips the question — if the namespace is about to expand dramatically, does owning the perfect address still matter? Its answer is no, and the timing matters more than the conclusion.
First-order effects
- Founders weighing product names gain cover to skip the premium aftermarket for exact-match .coms, redirecting budget that would have gone to brokers or squatters.
Second-order effects
- Registrars and the secondary domain market face softening demand at the top end precisely as ICANN's gTLD expansion floods supply — more inventory competing against falling perceived necessity.
Third-order effects
- If discovery keeps migrating to search and social rather than typed URLs, the structural value of the address bar erodes, and corporate '.brand' registrations become branding plays rather than traffic plays.
The trend: As web discovery shifts from typed addresses to search and social channels, the economics of premium domain names are decoupling from the expanding namespace itself.