One company details why .Xyz did not work for them

Gordon Hempton is the CEO of Spot Virtual did a blog post that is important for domain investors and businesses alike. Gordon detailed some of the problems he ran into with using the name Spot.xyz.

I don’t know that every company is experiencing what Gordon experienced but the post is worth reading with a balanced, open mind.

Gordon talked about Email Deliverability problems, the same with SMS. He mentions he knew better on the email end from past business experience. But still he went ahead using spot.xyz and he ran into problems.

Once we switched over to spotvirtual.com, not only did the anecdotal experience drastically improve, but we were able to quantify this based on some of our emails which were tracked. After switching, our initial email open rates rose from 70% to 86%, second email open rates rose from 50% to 72%, and overall meeting conversions rose from .1% to 3%! This improvement alone is worth the domain switch.

User perception was another issue:

After conducting business under spot.xyz we got the distinct impression that it was negatively impacting our brand. Although internally we did not share this same feeling, we would occasionally get feedback from users and prospects that the .xyz domain felt unprofessional and that they would prefer to use an app with a different URL.

Firewalls present another problem:

This is a straightforward downside to using a .xyz domain. Some organizations have the entire top-level .xyz domain blacklisted, disallowing all of their user base from accessing websites with that extension.

Now whether every company thinks about these problems or experiences them, is another story. As I track all the sales from Swetha at DNGear.com many companies who are very tech savvy seem to be going with .xyz.

I think it’s good to know what problems are out there and how to be able to alleviate them going forward.

Those Cheap $1 regs

I thought one thing Gordon mentioned stood out and registries need to think about this point.

Gordon wrote:

Avoid at all costs (or savings) all domains which are priced incredulously cheap. The poisoning of the proverbial .xyz well was most likely caused by really cheap prices and promotions causing them to be chosen by spammers. Looking on namecheap.com, .xyz domains are currently priced at $1 whereas .ai is priced at $70. The cost of a domain is trivial in the larger context of starting a business and well worth it.

That is not just an xyz thing. Every registry should think about how this plays in the minds of potential end users.