It's amazing that in the age of Google Search that anyone places any value on the TLD for a domain. Browser vendors have run dozens of studies that indicate that most people do not enter fully qualified domains in the address bar, which is why all address bars are wired into a search provider.
I feel like the the explosion of TLDs is a very thinly veiled money grab aimed at exploiting two groups of people:
When we first launched Sync we had to settle with "Sync.us" due to all other TLDs were taken. We forced ourselves to love the name. We printed "Sync For Us" on all our t-shirts and swag. We thought it was an awesome way to capitalize on the TLD. Sync Us .. Sync Us ... Sync Us ....
Boy, were we ever wrong! At some point the powers that be (Nokia I think) put Sync.com up for auction.
We stumbled on it quite accidentally, one of our developers landed on the auction page while trying to get to our own website. This little irony itself highlights the value of the TLD.
So we paid a small fortune and rebranded our company from Sync.us to Sync.com.
This turned out to be a game changer for Sync. Everything came into focus. People could more easily remember us, and find us. We gained credibility. Traffic to our website increased dramatically, as did signups.
Our initial TLD decision held us back.
Is .blog a good TLD? For WordPress users it just might be.
Look at my username so you know my answer is legit. The umlaut goes over a consonant.
Seriously though, I don't know how anyone names a business anymore and manages to get a reasonably relevant .com domain name. At some point we gotta give up and use these other TLDs.
I'd argue that a TLD can add semantic meaning to a website's domain name in a more general way than what would be possible by using subdomains, and without the clutter of using /paths/to/sections/and/pages.
I feel like the the explosion of TLDs is a very thinly veiled money grab aimed at exploiting two groups of people:
1) Trademark owners
2) Unsophisticated internet marketers