In addition to the familiar .com, .net and .org domains, close to 1400 new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDS) have been green-lighted. The new gTLDs are meant to alleviate the perceived real estate shortage in the .com world.

Many startups as well as existing business see the new domains as a way to get a better name for their companies, given what they see as lack of availability of .com names. The fact is a lot of great .com real estate is readily available but not yet leveraged, due to the wrongly held belief that your company name has to match your domain exactly.

This myth has been propagated by Silicon Valley engineers pretending to know something about branding when in reality the dictum “You don’t own your brand if you don’t own the exact .com” sprang from ego and ignorance. It’s based solely upon the ability of companies with great names to register a matching domain back in 1995. This “thinking” is what brought us the current crop of ridiculously name startups such as Spokely, Hurdly, Knowly, Qwerly, Quikkly, Kasually, Optimizely, Adnauseumly. None of these names have any value from a marketing, branding or advertising perspective. The only reason they were chosen is because the unmodified .com was obtainable. The poor results speak for themselves.

Do these new gTLDs represent an opportunity for companies to register a wider variety of powerful brand names?

History says, “no”. Think about it – .biz has been around for 13 years and is still not embraced by the business community, nor is .co, which has been available for 4 years.

So far there are approximately 300 domains delegated and almost 900 more are on the way. Which of these are you going to bet your business on?

Of the new gTLDs that have been delegated, .guru appears to be in the top three in terms of registrations, but labeling yourself or your company a “guru” is likely to been seen as sophomoric as it seems, especially if thousands of other are doing it. And let’s face it, a guru doesn’t label themself a guru, wannabe gurus do.

It’s not the end of the road for .com, not by a long shot and Elon Musk’s Tesla has shown the way. Tesla, a pure Internet play, was unable to obtain Tesla.com. The herd in the world of startups would have insisted Mr. Musk could not go forward with the name Tesla without owning Tesla.com – they would have demanded it be changed to something like Electicarly.com or whatever domain was registrable. Tesla correctly went forward with a modified domain, TeslaMotors.com. In this case the modifier “motors” was chosen, but the possible modifiers are nearly infinite. Here is a list of the 5,000 most common .com modifiers.

So why does not owning Tesla.com not hurt Tesla? It’s THE GOOGLE, people. The world finds what it’s looking for on THE GOOGLE.

When we were swirling in the vortex of the existential hell of “a Naming Agency naming itself” a dozen years ago, Igor.com was not for sale. Rather than change our name to Nameify or Namenently or register Igor.biz we went with a modifier and registered IgorInternational.com.

We’ve demonstrated what we believe in naming a business and choosing a domain – pick a great name then find a modifier to register a .com.

But it’s not just us. Ask yourself, “What would Elon Musk do?”

Further reading, via Forbes: “Seven Things To Think About Before You Register That New Domain”