Dotcom (.com) still rules

• Start-up to ditch .net for .com
• Founder pays just under US$10,000 for domain

IT may be the Asia Pacific century and Asia does have the fastest growing Internet adoption in the world, but when it comes to getting an internet domain for your business, .com still rules over other top level domains (TLDs).
 
Fortunately for me, while I had pressed for a .asia domain for Digital News Asia, my two co-founders insisted that .com was still the way to go and they have been proven right. In fact, many have expressed surprise that we were able to get the .com domain for digitalnewsasia.
 
According to one senior executive who acts as a mentor to start-ups, this is because of user behavior.
 
“We have been conditioned since the start of the Internet era to search for .com domains and that is a very hard habit to break today,” he says.
 
Most Malaysian start-ups, wisely, are not even trying. Those that did try are giving up. Over the recent Asian Business Angels Forum (ABAF) in Kuala Lumur, we met one start-up that had recently purchased the .com of a domain it had in another TLD. The founder requested for anonymity until he launched the new site.
 
“We want to move up to the next level and for that we need to go .com,” said the founder who has an active base of followers over Twitter.
 
The founder proved to be a good negotiator  --  while the bidding for the domain he wanted started at US$50,000, he managed to get it for just under US$10,000. It was still a hefty sum when factoring in the currency conversion but the founder feels it will be worth it.
 
“We are excited about launching the new .com domain with a fresh and snazzy new site.” Hopefully revenue will spike too.