3 letter acronym .io or a brandable .com ?

jagan123 · May 12, 2013

I have an offer for a 3 letter .io
The domain is an acronym, related and is very catchy with my target audience.

I already own another 8letter brandable .com related to the same niche.
This is for a webapp/SaaS company.

Need help knowing if a .io is a better choice than a .com in this case. How much is it worth?
Also, how does a .io extension fair in terms of SEO ?

Thanks

Gerry · May 12, 2013

The better question would have been...

Everyone raise your hand if you had heard about .io.

What's next? ao. po. scs

jagan123 · May 21, 2013

*bump*
I need to decide this week whether to go for this or not.
Update: Google now treats .io as gcctld. Does this help anyway?
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1347922

Thanks

jmcc · May 23, 2013

The key is how the end users treat the domain rather than the search engines. Will the end users remember it and use it? If you want to know what impact it will have, ask someone not in the domain name business to name three .io websites or domains. Then ask them to name three .com or .ccTLD sites that they can remember. If people cannot remember the domain name, then it will take a lot more than SEO to make them remember it. It will take marketing and money.

I would have heard about this ccTLD but then I have heard of most of them.

Regards...jmcc