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TheNextWeb.org & TheNextWeb.com!

Written on 6th October 2008 26 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Earlier today we were the lucky winners of the Sedo auction for TheNextWeb.com. We noticed it was for sale a few weeks ago and offered $1000 just to see if the owner would be interested in selling. Turned out that $1000 was enough to start a public auction that ended today.

Near the end of the auction we all grouped around one computer and kept reloading the page ready to bid more if the bid would increase. The last 3 minutes were extremely noisy with everybody screaming their lungs out in excitement! Luckily nobody else placed a bid and we were announced the winner by Sedo.

Here is a screenshot of the last minute. It seemed to take forever:

We will be keeping the .ORG domain name and will move to the new domain somewhere in the following month.

26 Comments »

About the author: Serial entrepreneur and founder of several companies. Current activities include TwitterCounter.com & this Blog. Boris is also very active on Twitter: @Boris

26 comments/trackbacks to “TheNextWeb.org & TheNextWeb.com!”

Nov 11, 2008: TheNextWeb.org IS NOW TheNextWeb.com!
[...] month we bought TheNextWeb.com in an auction at Sedo.com for only $1000. It took a while to transfer the domain to our hosting provider but it [...]
Nov 14, 2008: Speedy B News » Blog Archive » TheNextWeb.org IS NOW TheNextWeb.com!
[...] month we bought TheNextWeb.com in an auction at Sedo.com for only $1000. It took a while to transfer the domain to our hosting provider but it [...]
Nov 21, 2008: Looking back: moving from .ORG to .COM
[...] we switched our blogs domain name from TheNextWeb.org to TheNextWeb.com. About a month before that we bought the .COM domain in an auction for $1000 at Sedo. The move itself was fairly easy and took no more than 5 [...]

By Robin Wauters on Oct 6, 2008

Cool, always thought it was strange to have a .org.

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on October 6th, 2008:
I can explain that! When we first came up with the name we wanted to avoid Web2.0 and came up with “Next Web” as a term that would last longer. We actually liked the .org option because we wanted the conference to ‘feel’ like a movement instead of a commercial project. The .com wasn’t available at all so we just ignored it.

But now that we have it we are happy anyway!

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By CanJohn on Oct 6, 2008

Well worth the money i reckon, .com’s always the more credited domain to have.

good news all round. Will you be redirecting from the .com to this one or moving the site to .com and redirecting from this one?

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on October 6th, 2008:
I don’t know yet. We need a SEO expert to give us advice on that issue.

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By Mircea on October 6th, 2008:
You should make .com as the main destination and use .org as redirection. But make the redirection a 301 Moved permanently. Google would be fine with that. Like somebody said, the Pagerank might drop for a few months but it will come back if you use that kind of redirect).
Of course, you have to do changes on your Feedburner feed and maybe to the internal links (you should look for a plugin which can manage this kind of change).

It’s a small price to pay but in the end the .com domain will be more valuable than .org.

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By A @ NoWorkDay.com on Oct 6, 2008

I think .org sounds good and good call that you keep it that way.

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on October 6th, 2008:
Thanks! I like .ORG too but I have also heard that .COM is better for SEO. Any ideas on that?

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By A @ NoWorkDay.com on October 6th, 2008:
I dont think it holds any truth in it. Its just more sites use .com and thats why you see more .com results. Maybe Im wrong..

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By Steven Carroll on October 7th, 2008:
Agreed there is no SEO benefit to a com over a biz, org or even a dodgy cc. A simple 301 redirect would pass over the pagerank, though all the internal pages which had links and bookmarks, would loose their individual status, unless you could do a clever trick with a 301 redirect where you keep all the page urls exactly the same then redirect all org pages to the com equivalents.

This is a helpful list of such redirects
http://support.netfirms.com/article.php?id=696

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By daniel on Oct 6, 2008

congratulations!

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By CanJohn on Oct 6, 2008

I’ve been doing SEO for about a year and a half but dont go by my advice alone by any means.

I think keeping with the .org will be best to be honest. If you changed to .com n redirected then it might drop your rankings for 1-3 months before they get to normal again. But .com is more respected in my opinion.

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By drivingsouth on Oct 6, 2008

What about follow google and make thenextweb.org a foundation?

:)

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By drivingsouth on Oct 6, 2008

What about follow google and make thenextweb.org a foundation?

:)

I can imagine… TheNextWeb foundation donated blablabla millions…

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By Laurens on Oct 6, 2008

I like .com better.. good job and congratulations.

As for SEO.. 301 will do right?!

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By Roy Tomeij on October 7th, 2008:
Yes, it will. As long as you make sure that all individual URL’s redirect with 301’s to the appropriate URL’s on the new domain. Not really rocket science :)

Whatever you do, make sure you don’t run the identical website on .org and .com. Duplicate content, Google not happy.

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By Patrick de Laive on Oct 6, 2008

I would love to see the .com website as the main website. It is more respected and a lot less confusing when you hand out your business card or say the domain name.

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By Linde on Oct 6, 2008

how exciting! congratulations on the .com!

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By Marijn on Oct 6, 2008

I always find it kinda sucks when your first bid wins, you prob. offered to much!

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By Boris on October 6th, 2008:
Don’t rain on my parade!

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By SE7EN on Oct 6, 2008

Congrats on .com
I own a .net domain that I want .com too but the owner won’t let it go easily.

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By Matt on Oct 6, 2008

Congrats guys!

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By Jason on Oct 7, 2008

Congrats! Getting the dot COM will definitely help users -and- the site’s image…

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By Cindy on Oct 7, 2008

You know what they say..
“One person’s junk is another’s treasure…”

No offense of course, I like your site and name is easy to remember. Redirect the .com to the .org so I don’t have to mis-type your site name ever again :-)

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