What types of companies do you think a .com matters most for?

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What types of companies do you think a .com matters most for?

You wrote in the below thread about your (fascinating!) experience securing the mercury.com domain, and talked a bit about why the .com was important for Mercury. How do you think other businesses should approach a decision on the ROI of a .com purchase?

Mentioned

#Mercury

@immad

6 months ago

Most important when trust is crucial to the business.

I would weigh the following factors:

Do most customers access your site via the web? If mobile app then the domain is less important.
How important is trust to the brand you need to build? For Mercury where trust is the most important part of our brand the .com is more important.
Whats the cost of the .com? Often with startups its about opportunity cost, at a cheap enough price its definitely worth it.

@samantha____a (replying to @immad )

6 months ago

Love that you were able to get the .com. Our .com is taken and active, so we settled for .io and we're happy with it.

@preshdkumar (replying to @immad )

6 months ago

Solids points.... on the flip side, in an investors perspective, we look at a good “.com” as good signaling for the founder especially if they’re at an early stage... signals to us that the founder is able negotiate (depending on the # of letters in the word, they can be very costly), cares deeply about the brand, customers will probably feel more confident as well.. IMO.

@immad (replying to @preshdkumar )

6 months ago

Yeah. Also from an investor perspective the cost of the .com is an asset on the books which changes the ROI argument.

@adamdlurie (replying to @immad )

6 months ago

Interesting to think how much brand trust is tied to '.com'. Do you think the value in a ".com" will go down over the years as consumers increasingly become more comfortable with alternatives?

@immad (replying to @adamdlurie )

6 months ago

The trend is definitely downhill for .com. Zoom is still Zoom.us (even though they own the .com).

I think there will always be a premium for .com as long as people still get to website via URLs.

@awwstn (replying to @immad )

6 months ago

One area where the .com still makes a huge difference is SEO. Google doesn’t weigh .coms higher, but CTR on search results skews toward .coms.

This question is part of an AMA with Immad Akhund.

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