
A friend of mine is buying a domain for his startup, it’s not their primary domain, it’s the name of a product. The .COM that matches the product domain is owned by a multi-billion dollar company so while it’s still possible to buy, getting it for less than six-figures would be unlikely.
So when it came to their second choice, .APP was what they were looking at, and after that .CO. I was surprised that .NET wasn’t in their top two so asked my friend a bit more about that. He said that he was a fan of .NET but that most of the team felt it was an old/less-relevant extension, they also talked to one of their advisors who said the domain broker they had been working with had always been down on .NET.
I’ve seen a handful of situations like this over the last few months, companies that look at extensions like .IO, .APP, .CO, .AI and others and often don’t even consider .NET. While I’m a fan of .IO and .CO, I’m not a big .APP guy, that one makes less sense to me, but I still have plenty of love for .NET.
Is .NET less hip than something like .IO or .CO? What do you think?

To me .net is very much second fidle to .com, and it has that image clearly. Where is .io / .co /.ai get to play on the cool image of, we don’t even want .com. They probably do, but it allows for narration of we are cool and cutting edge, and wanted to do things differently. Where is .net tells the story of “we couldn’t get .com, so here is .net”
I am in blockchain space, and .io is normal maybe more so than .com, and often companies do own .com but they chose to go with .io as they primary. For example bubble.is have upgraded themselves to bubble.io . I know because i went to event last fall, and when guy gave me his card with bubble.is , he had to explain that they just upgraded to .io and its no longer .is.
Flying back from Namescon, i sat next to CFO of Barclay center who uses bseglobal.net/ , and she told me how much she hated .net and how clients not liking it. It feels as second best. Anecdotal, but in agregate i think .net is getting weaker as .io/co/ai become an option. I personally don’t like .app as it is pigeon holing themselves, as thats one brand you will need to upgrade from.