I’ve noticed more companies shortening their .com domains over time, sometimes years after launch. I collected a few examples in this post and was curious if others here have seen similar trends or have more examples.

- The shorter the domain, the easier to advertise it on radio and TV and less likely people spell it wrong ending up at the wrong place - such as a squatted or watering hole domain.

- Shorter is easier to remember.

- Shorter is easier to type on a cell phone.

- Shorter is easier to type when inebriated - not always a good thing.

it's not really a "case for" anything, to my eye it's mostly that as companies get bigger they are more willing (and able) to just spaff $10m up a wall on something very stupid like a .com domain to replace the domain that they got successful with.

Still waiting on Microsoft to rebrand to Soft.

Who is still typing domains nowadays?

You open your browser and (mis)type anything and get to the (almost) right site.

Well, yeah, obviously. Where you get the millions of dollars to buy those short names isn't so obvious, though.

duh.com obvious.ly

chat.openai.com to chatgpt.com made sense. Chatgpt.com to chat.com makes less sense IMO, for it's the "gpt" part that people know is associated with AI. They probably bought chat.com just to show off, they burn billions every month, so what's a few million (at most) for a domain?

back to the world of generic-word.com like in the dotcom boom days.

Registrars [like Namecheap] label short, original, distinctive domains [like the one you spent weeks, months brainstorming] as "premium" right at the moment of registration, even if they were available only days or weeks prior. Once these domains are marked as premium, they are sold at exorbitant prices, often far beyond their true market value. In essence, a registrar hijacks what would otherwise be a standard domain, inflating its value simply because it's easy to do so.

There's a sharp contrast when you work with, for instance, a Brazilian registrar, Registro.br, where all domains are treated equally.

If that's true the x.com is brilliant. I think you can have to short, to generic domains for them to be actually useful/descriptive. For instance I think chatgpt.com is better branding that just chat.com.

Also tinycapital.com → tiny.com, capital.com works, but tiny.com doesn't really tell you anything.

This is a timely article.. if it was 1998!

“However fancy a domain is, every successful business, especially with an online presence, ends up with a .com, the right .com.”

https://brajeshwar.com/2024/dot-com/