Nobody Upgrades Away From .Com
There are plenty of reasons a company might launch on a domain name that isn’t its ideal choice.
The matching .com may already be owned by someone else. It may be too expensive at the time. The company may be testing an idea and not ready to spend much on a domain name. In some cases, a different extension might even fit the business particularly well.
But when companies decide it is time to upgrade their domain name, the direction of travel is usually pretty obvious.
They move to the .com.
You don’t often hear about a successful company that owns and uses its exact-match .com domain name deciding it is time for an upgrade and moving the business to another extension instead.
“Things are going great. Revenue is growing. We just raised a big round. Let’s move off the .com.”
That isn’t really a conversation that happens.
What does happen is the opposite.
Companies grow into their brands. They raise capital, expand their customer base, advertise more heavily, hire more employees, and become more widely known. At some point, the domain name that was perfectly adequate when the company launched can start to feel like a compromise.
The exact-match .com can remove that compromise.
It is typically the domain name customers will naturally assume a company owns. It can help reduce confusion, prevent traffic from being sent elsewhere, and give a brand a domain name that matches the scale of the business.
There are many excellent domain name extensions, and plenty of successful companies use them.
But when the word “upgrade” gets used in connection with a domain name acquisition, the destination is very often the same.
.com