I plan on doing a more in-depth article about this topic on Medium but I thought I’d poll my blog readers first and see what the general consensus is. The question I’m asking is one that more and more startups and small businesses will be asking themselves over the next 3-5 years.
For the greater part of a decade the answer was always, go .COM or go home. Then TLDs like .CO and .ME showed the world that wildly successful companies can start and grow their business raising tens of millions of dollars on non-.COMS. Companies like Brit.co and About.me are great examples of the power a non .COM brand can have.
All that being said, people are used to .COM (in the US, in Spain people are used to .ES, in Germany they’re used to .DE) and old habits die hard. Here’s the million dollar question – as a startup that wants to call themselves something like “Drive” and they don’t have the budget for Drive.com, do they brand themselves as something like GetDrive.com or DriveApp.com or pick their first choice name and go with something like Drive.co or Drive.me?
What would you do? Comment and let your voice be heard!

Hello Morgan
Are you talking about ccTLDs or gTLDs?
1st choice i would take a .com
2nd. choice i would take .co or .me if the site it’s developed for US traffic/use
3.rd i would take the .whatever
I did a little whois research and i see people spending $200-$5000 on new G’s. and they are not domainers.
One of the problem with new G’s they are not known to the public were .co and .me are.
I called eastern europe to a friend (not a domainer ) and ask him if he ever heard of .co and he said yes,so awareness it’s a key factor.