I was taking a look at an image that displayed the Internet’s most popular sites since the beginning of the commercial Web and up until this point, when I realized that several were/are allegedly “domain killers” (the image I’m referring to can be found below).

Let’s see:

Did Geocities make domains obsolete? After all, why pay money for a domain when Geocities makes everything just one click away? Needless to say, Geocities ended up being anything but a domain killer.

Ok, but what about Blogger or WordPress.com? Why pay money for a self-hosted site/blog when you can get a yoursite.blogspot.com or yoursite.wordpress.com free of charge? Needless to say, businesses didn’t exactly abandon domains.

The sites which were considered but have proven not to be domain killers can be found if you take a look at the gray arrows.

But what about the red arrows?

What about social media sites like Facebook and Twitter? In my opinion, the end result will be similar to the Blogger/Wordpress.com scenario: businesses won’t abandon domains in order to put their entire online presence in the hands of a platform such as FB. While these sites are popular sure, they’ll be used in ad campaigns and what not but a domain + “real” site will always be the foundation of the online presence of most businesses.

Ok but what about apps? Well, I’ll just ask the same question I asked last year: do you think that launching an app without owning the domain is a good idea?

All in all, the conclusion is simple: some sites/companies/technologies will always be considered “domain killers” by some people but in my opinion, domains will always be the “foundation” of the Internet.