There has been a huge explosion in domain names. Now that IPV4 has given way to IPV6, the number of permissible domain names has risen from a paltry 4,228,250,625 possibilities to a mildly more sane and sensible 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (approximately). That's probably more addresses than atoms on planet Earth.
Along with this, the old two and three letter domain extensions such as .org, .com, .uk, .us have all been superseded by long extensions such as .company, .church etc and all at vastly inflated prices. I used to pay $3.99 for my domain names. I culled domain names when they rose to $10.99. Many of the new names are $34.99 and more. It's just not worth it for something unlikely to generate much income!
In fact, since nobody seems to type domain names in as anything other than a search term, these days, the question that becomes more relevant is - do we still care about domain names? With such a proliferation, the old method of typing in a company name and adding dot com to find the company other than by doing a Google search has become a bit hit and miss.
The big bonus with the new domain name proliferation is that domain squatters now will not be able to register every domain name they can think of. It's just too expensive for them to register every variation of a name on every domain out there.
A side bonus of the new domain names is that nobody will much care now. There's no special prestige behind any domain name. A .org is just as good as a .xxx or a .church. Nobody will really care any more what the extension is or even whether it's a subdomain. To my mind, it seems better to have a good label on the website that can be found easily on a Google search and to use that label multiple times - perhaps on every page and every post. Thus, if you put "Mr Blobby" on every page, eventually Google would default to your website than the websites about Mr Blobby.
To my mind, domain names have ceased to be relevant to anything. Mind, I have a feeling that the internet is becoming increasingly irrelevant to people's lives though nobody can imagine life without it any more.
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