I'm curious how much it really matters. I can see it being a big deal for email, but for organic traffic I'm not convinced. Most domain squatters don't have anything up on the site, have a adsense landing page or something extremely outdated. Assuming your site has even mild success, your search engine ranking will be much, much higher. Sadly, the email issue is probably a show-stopper.
Also, I don't think a lot of people actually type the domain in the address bar. They're either clicking a link or searching.
The real question here is, can you pull a dropbox? Trademark the name, launch your site, get popular, then just take away the .com if the owner somehow infringes on your mark. Is this a valid precedent or do you have to have boat-loads of cash to actually make this work?
In any case, it's probably just easier to choose a different name. I just emailed someone yesterday about a .com domain name and he wanted $20k. Seems like the dropbox method might be easier.
Comments
I posted a similar question a couple of days ago here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058437
I'm curious how much it really matters. I can see it being a big deal for email, but for organic traffic I'm not convinced. Most domain squatters don't have anything up on the site, have a adsense landing page or something extremely outdated. Assuming your site has even mild success, your search engine ranking will be much, much higher. Sadly, the email issue is probably a show-stopper.
Also, I don't think a lot of people actually type the domain in the address bar. They're either clicking a link or searching.
The real question here is, can you pull a dropbox? Trademark the name, launch your site, get popular, then just take away the .com if the owner somehow infringes on your mark. Is this a valid precedent or do you have to have boat-loads of cash to actually make this work?
In any case, it's probably just easier to choose a different name. I just emailed someone yesterday about a .com domain name and he wanted $20k. Seems like the dropbox method might be easier.