Dot.com is still king

Dot.com is still king, but ought to you invest in other domain names?

Today at TRAFFIC a panel of domain-industry experts came out decidedly in favor of investment in dot-coms, rather than other extensions, when asked where a fresh investor ought to put their money. They didn’t dismiss .net or .info or other extensions outright by any means. Following are a number of comments from the panelists, edited for clarity:

Brian Taff, vice president of corporate development, NameMedia Inc., a buyer and seller of domains: Dot-com “is the lead top-level domain and will always be the lead TLD. There may be some speculation opportunity in others, but the people who do buy the dot-whatever eventually do want the dot-com. Dot-com is really where it’s at. And it’s going to be where it’s at.”

Ron Jackson, editor, DNJournal.com: If you don’t have deep pockets, a key place to find value may be areas like .us.

Ari Goldberger, domain lawyer and investor, ESQwire.com and SmartName.com: “In a lot of cases, domains are tremendously undervalued,” but in sizable part, those are dot-coms.

Bob Martin, CEO, Internet REIT, online media firm: A key thing in favor of a dot-com focus is that “one of the hardest things to change in the world is patterns of user behavior.”

-David Kesmodel