Is .xyz the new .com?

A domain or website name is your web address on the Internet — a unique name with which your websites are identified and which is, in other words, the foundation of your online business. Even though it might seem simple, choosing the right domain, finding it and registering it can sometimes be quite a nuisance for website owners.

You need to find a domain that is easy to remember, that describes you in the best way, that is short (up to 10 characters is recommended), that is creative, and something of utmost importance — a domain that is free!

A domain can have different extensions, which you might have noticed in website URLs, such as: .com, .hr, .net, .org, .biz etc, but did you know that there is a relatively new domain extension: .xyz?

The requested domain is taken. What now?

In 2011, ICANN, an international non-profit organization that, in short, manages IP addresses and domains, decided that, due to the domain market saturation, we needed new extensions. In 2012, they launched new domains such as .beer, .active, .bible and among them .xyz, which gives new young entrepreneurs the opportunity to buy and sell up to date unprecedented, unique web addresses with new extensions.

.XYZ domains were put into circulation in June 2014 and were created by a then twenty year old marketing expert Daniel Negari, with the idea to offer an alternative to the ruling .com domains. Investing in the new domain names cost him only $ 185,000, as he was the only one interested in this extension, and the return on the investment came as early as in the first month. We say “only” because, if there are several stakeholders, the domain goes on an auction where its price increases rapidly, as, for example, Google paid $ 25 million for the .app domain.

Negari chose this move because, as he says, the most logical possible ending of a web site is .xyz. If the alphabet ends with these letters, websites should as well. Makes sense doesn’t it?

The entire .xyz idea revolves around the fact that, however it seems to us — the Internet is not limitless, at least when it comes to internet address names. The fact itself that no 2 same internet addresses can exist leads us to a conclusion that new domain extensions will not only become a trend, but a necessity as the number of users increases. Exactly that is what is currently happening with .xyz domains, which already compete with .com.

The confirmation of this philosophy has also come from Google, which in 2015 bought the abc.xyz (alphabet.com was already busy) domain for its Alphabet, which will serve as a roof company for several Google companies. Regarding Google search engine ranking, this will boost new users to use .xyz instead of .com domain, because — if this extension is good for Google, then logically it would be good for you, and you will not have issues around placing your addresses among the top search results. The company sells their .xyz domains at minimal prices, with the intention for their domains to be purchased by small business owners, instead of the internet prepaid bidders who pre-purchase thousands of domains with different attractive names, hoping that, someday, somebody will redeem them for big money.

Exactly how much Google paid for its abc.xyz domain has never been revealed.

Founder Negari just commented that Google will pay him $8 a year to keep the abc.xyz domain. “A domain is a domain, and its price is the same for the owner of Google and for the owner of any blog site.“

But, before Google opted for .xyz, around 3,000 of these domains were purchased per day, and after Google’s release, that figure grew to over 20,000.

If you want to have a short, memorable web address today, with only 4 characters, on popular .com domains — you are out of luck, as you should have remembered to do that before, because all 456,976 combinations have already been taken! Every second, 8 new users enter the Internet sky, and if you want to choose a new name for your website, you will have an average of 9 attempts until you get the combination that you like.

.com domain is unprecedented for the first generation of online innovators, but it is an opportunity for new generations of entrepreneurs and internet users to demand new, easy-to-remember, short and creative internet addresses for their webs. There are currently over 2 million web addresses with the .xyz extension, so if you want to be trendy — hurry up and make sure your character combination is free.

Creativity in the selection of domain extensions is in no shortage, so today you can register a .pizza domain for your pizzeria, a .ninja domain for experts, .kim for those who share that name or who simply like it.

Technological giants, Google, Amazon and others have been waging war on opening and popularizing new extensions such as .app and .book. The owner of the .xyz has control over eight more extensions including .college, .rent, and .security, and announces the acquisition of .car, .cars, and .auto extensions. It can be said that a man who was not even born at the time when the first .com domain was registered knows what he is doing.

Whether his .xyz becomes the next .com is up to be seen.

Originally published at www.avalon.host.

Is .xyz the new .com? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.