What Domain Ending Should Your Startup Be? 66.5% of Top Startups Use Dotcom

Have you ever wondered what domain endings are doing well for startups?

Startup of the Year Voting ran for 6 months from June 2021 to January 2022. On Valentine’s Day, the startup of the year winners were announced. Of the winners, I analyzed what domain endings these successful startups most often chose. “.com” overwhelming led the way with 66.5% of the startups, followed by “.co” (6.4%), “.io (5.4%), “.ai” (1.7%), “.org” (1.5%), “.net” (1.3%) and then a number of other niche domain endings used by less than 1% of the Startup of the Year Winners.

All of the startup winners earned tech company news pages on HackerNoon. Essentially, the community voted on which startups deserve more coverage. These pages include business overviews (such as head count, founding year, bio, social links, and domain ranking) coupled with dynamic updates every time the company is mentioned in HackerNoon stories or relevant headlines around the web.

I think this data indicates that the dotcom mainstream web is still more trusted in terms of founders branding their startup, and the rest of the internet trusting that the company is who they say they are. The purpose of a domain is not only letting people know what your name is, but also that your name - and company - will pass the test of time. While it can be trendy to brand your CI/CD startup ".io” or your machine learning startup “.ai,” those domain endings lack the implied longevity of “.com.” It was there near the beginning of the internet, I believe it’ll be there near the end of the internet. Even when a tech giant like Google rebrands to to abc.xyz, it is google.com that gets all the usage. Next year, let’s see which domain endings rise and fall!

We also open sourced this startup voting data (still cleaning up and better organizing some of the data, thanks for the patience! I wanted to share some early learnings) if anyone would like to use it :-)