Did Domainers forget about .ME?

I had an interesting experience last week that I thought I’d share with all of you, and as you can probably guess by the title of this post, it has to do with the .ME domain extension.

A friend of mine recently sold his company and is getting ready to start the next. He told me what he wanted to call his company and we started to iterate on TLDs. He had already looked-into the .COM and it was out of his price range so we started going through different options.

While .IO and .AI are popular with startups, they are context-specific. Most startups that brand on a .IO are dev or startup focused, .AI goes to AI companies, my friends company is neither. Without giving too much away his company is about helping people improve their lives.

It clicked when he said, “I want people to think, this is a company that’s going to help me become a better version of me,” to which I said, “well then have you thought about a .ME domain? He hadn’t – we looked, and the name, which is taken in honestly every extension under the sun, was available to hand reg.

This is a premium name, one that would easily command six-figures in .COM, and while someone had registered it years ago, it had expired, didn’t get a single bid in an expiry auction, and was out there to hand register. Which made me think, have Domainers forgotten about .ME?

I personally invested in a handful of .ME domains back in 2012 and ended up selling two of them for $10,000 (camping.me and rap.me) but the buck stopped there for me and I didn’t put much more focus on the extension. I’m thinking I’m probably not alone. As extensions like .IO, .AI, .VC, .GG and others have taken off, maybe we all forgot about .ME. What do you think?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton