[Throwaway90283]

I believe it's still .com, then everything else, even if people typically find sites through search.

Why? If I write on a poster john.com, or on a cereal box, or on my business card, or I say 'visit us at john.com' on the radio, or my tv commercial says john.com at the end, people know exactly what to do. They recognize the words john.com as a website they can visit or search.

Now, if I say, 'visit us at john.ninja' on the radio, people have no idea what I'm even referring towards. If it's on my business card, people are wondering if my last name is ninja, or maybe this is just a fun play on words, and I refer to myself as john.ninja and the dot in-between the words is for design purposes. To fix that, you need to write more, www.john.ninja. However, it's still difficult for people to digest. Most people would probably ask, 'that's a website?', and then they would just visit google and type in 'john ninja', which may or may not get them to my site.

[icebraining]

If you put http://john.ninja, I'd bet most people would figure it out.

As a side note, that's a real address :)

[Throwaway90283]

Try saying that on the radio, or at a meeting, or during a presentation, or when networking with someone.

It's a mess, you're having a drink and meet someone in your industry. Oh, visit my site, it's john.ninja, or http://john.ninja. They'll give you the 'huh?' look, and you need to explain that it ends in .ninja instead of .com.

You'll always need to write a longer address and can't say john.ninja. You'll always need to explain in a little more detail how to visit the website. If your site ever becomes a huge success, lots of people will be visiting john.com, so hopefully they don't run a similar business or anything inappropriate one day.

Imagine if you were Netflix, and you ran the business using the domain Netflix.video. You would be going insane right now, and be willing to spend a small fortune trying to get a hold of Netflix.com. If you bought the domain for 20 million, people would agree it was a good move and investment. That's just how important having the .com domain is to a business.

[return0]

h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash is a phrase i ve never heard anywhere, while 'dotcom' is already in the lexicon.

I think people will go back to prefixing their address with www to make them recognizable as web addresses, e.g. www.john.ninja

[Retr0spectrum]

Since most modern browsers hide the http://, I'm sure a lot of people would still have no idea.

[martin-adams]

Or www.john.ninja might be more recognisable than http://john.ninja. Albeit different URLs but the www is easier to accept than a ninja TLD.