Did Zoom catalyze renewed interest in .US domains?

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When I first started in the Domaining world back in 2007 I made a few big mistakes. The first was, I invested in .MOBI. My thinking was, mobile phones are taking off, and people are going to want to go to mobile-specific websites, .MOBI is perfect for this. While yes, mobile phones did take off, and people do browse the web like crazy on them, mobile responsive sites won the day and work fine on any TLD.

The second mistake I made was thinking I had figured something out that other domain investors before me had overlooked. I thought, all these Domainers are focused on .COM, but there are a ton of .US domains out there, and the US is a huge market, I should buy a ton of those.

So yes, my early domain portfolio had a lot of .MOBI and .US names in it, and well, as you can probably guess, I didn’t make a lot of sales. I dropped the vast majority of those early purchases and since then I’ve been a .COM guy, pretty much laser-focused on two-word .COMs.

A couple of weeks ago though something interesting happened that made .US pop back into my head again. I was talking to a friend who is starting a new company, he company is one word, and a very common word. I helped him get in touch with the owner of the .COM and they wanted $3M for the name, fair price to be honest, but not in budget for him.

“Do you want me to look at the .NET for you, maybe the .IO?” I asked.

“Actually, my second choice is .US” he said.

I was shocked. And of course I had to ask, “why the heck would the .US be your second choice?”

“Well, Zoom built a billion dollar company on a .US, and it’s a short, easy to remember extension and makes sense for a business based in and focusing on the US market.”

So I’m wondering, are more people thinking like this? Does Zoom’s meteoric success while branding on Zoom.us bode well for the .US domain name extension?

What do you think?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton