There's another serious problem with newer TLDs: there are millions of websites out there that "validate" email addresses against hardcoded lists of known/valid TLDs. Anyone who spends $1000+ on a fancy domain is going to be extremely frustrated when every other week or month they stumble on another site that refuses to accept their email address as valid.

The only safe domains for everyday use are .com, .net, and .org - and the well-known country codes that have been around for at least 10 years. Anything else is going to cause you headaches, and your "investment" for a short memorable domain name is not going to feel worthwhile.

Plus, the registrars are scum with these TLDs. Just stay away.

Yup, and whole companies are blocking new TLDs. Too much spam.

> So why not just register a .com

Because the name you wish to register is not available as .com domain.

> Nobody is going to remember or type in such a domain

I don't think this is true, I live in Europe and we have tons of country tlds, people use and remember them.

Also is chris.blog really so much longer to type then chris.com or a lot harder to remember? I don't agree.

At first it might feel strange to type something else then .com but as I said in europe we have country tlds and it works well.

I may be wrong and just speaking from experience, but Americans were really trapped in the .com/net/org for a long time. I think, because that's all we were exposed to... I didn't realize the depth and usage of CCTLDs until I moved to Europe, and saw them everywhere. When I gave my mom my first work email she added a .com after the .at at the end, and wondered why it never got to me.

> Also is chris.blog really so much longer to type then chris.com or a lot harder to remember? I don't agree.

It depends on the audience. If you have a non-technical audience or you are e-commerce a .com is basically a necessity still.

Also in Europe, but I've seen adverts using .travel domains (which are a bit older than most), like egypt.travel and ecuador.travel.

City domains, like sadiq.london.

Admittedly, I can't remember any publicity of the weirder ones, like .lol or .xyz.

Have you ever tried to buy a .com domain dude? There's hardly any useful names left.

All 60+ domains I own are .com although I have a .net and a .org for a couple of words. I only paid premium price of $2000 on one of them. My company name is Sendlinks and getting Sendlinks.com kind of makes sense. ;)

In particular, I have a 5-character easy to spell meaningless name that I am reserving for some large scale service I will build in the future.

Getting an unregistered .com is tough, but many are available at a reasonable price on secondary market. I define reasonable price as under $1000. When I decided on the Sendlinks name, the seller originally wanted $5000. I made the decision to buy it at that price once I was ready to re-brand.

Since no one else would likely buy the name, I wasn't too concerned about someone taking it. Fast forward a few months later, I was at the point where I had money and so I decided to just buy it then and cross that item from my launch checklist. Luckily for me, the price dropped to $2000.

I own the .com domains of my Internet nickname and my last name among other properties.

That's not true. I just registered a six letter domain a few months ago (minops.com).

There's still plenty of good ones left. I created a program to help me find them: https://github.com/jedberg/wordgen

My point is that you're better off with a "bad" .com domain (bad really just means more than 10 characters long) than a "good" .weird domain.