It's still better to have the .com anyways, because then you aren't potentially competing on SEO with someone else with the same brand name and a "better" domain to use it with. Like it or not, .com domains are the de facto namespace for consumer-facing products and having the .com for your brand up for sale or already taken is just asking for problems.
* Getting a better brand with a wacky .com name ("getxyz.com")
* Getting a better brand with an "exotic" extension
* Spending a ton of money
The exotic extension seemed the least sucky option at the time. I'm not sure that "voostapp.com" (or whatnot) is more easily found than "voo.st", it's still a trip to google.
The big surprise (to me) is that NICs can fail so spectacularly. I really didn't expect this. It might have changed our decision a year ago... but we're pretty much stuck with it now.
This is still true today, but has been becoming less and less true for years now. The .com namespace just isn't big enough.
Today we're mostly just dealing with it - I suspect I'm somewhat more protected here in Australia than most US based people - many of my clients are fine with a $foo.com.au domain even if the $foo.com isn't available, so long as $foo.com isn't already a direct competitor.
The pool of available .com domains just isn't going to support all the things people want to do with domain names in the short and medium term future. Something is going to have to change - and whatever that change is, it's somehow going to have to avoid the problem of all the .com domain owners immediately registering the .newtld version or fraudulently/incorrectly using trademark law to muscle out new businesses.
While some insist that simply having a .edu domain, regardless of the site’s quality, content, and incoming links, will give you more weight with the major search engines, it’s just not true. Who says so? Matt Cutt, a top engineer at Google, in this video.[1][2]
and
Sadly this whole engagement is based on a faulty assumption: It is not the Edu-toplevel domain which gives universities such a high relevance in Google for their references but the backlink-structure of the domains themselves. Universities have the advantage that on one hand, in most cases they have had online representations for a long time (stanford.edu for example was registered 1985) and on the other hand they have lots of content which was and is linked voluntarily. This is a long time to (unconsciously) build a “great” backlink-structure in Google's point of view.[3]
Hopefully that addresses your second point, too:
I wouldn't be surprised if .com's did as well but I've never had that confirmed
You should be astonished if they did.
Having said that, some early naive autocomplete implementations in browser address bars bias .com over other extensions. I'm not sure anyone has ever measured the impact of this.
I don't know that there is one, I just meant "better" from a branding perspective. Interesting question though, I'd love to know if there was TLD-specific bumps.
Ah, gotcha. That's a branding advantage that disappears a little more every year as consumers get more internet savvy, but it's certainly still a factor.
