.IO domains have been steadily rising in Alexa over the past years and it’s actually kind of remarkable to see how many of them appear in these top lists. It wasn’t always this way, in 2015-2016 you rarely found any .io domains in the lists, but fast forward to now and they are pretty omnipresent in the top tier (read: startups & developer tools).
The first trigger was of course the association with “input/output” that gave it a developer appeal from the get-go. GitHub for example used it for some of their internal projects and a bunch of Y Combinator startups followed suite... which pretty much cemented .io domains as the “de rigeur” SaaS/niche API service subdomain. The British Indian Ocean Territory has a whole different set of priorities than Silicon Valley’s most popular extension though.
GitHub.io is one of the main reasons of course, GitHub gives every user and every project a subdomain at github.io so you end up with this kind of network effect of thousands of individual developers portfolios, project documentation sites all subdomains underneath github.io that individually probably account for thousands of unique domains all benefitting from the reputation of the parent domain. That alone probably explained a significant portion of the .io rankings but even outside of that companies were building real business around the .io extension. Coinbase had their blog at blog.coinbase.io, some SaaS startups decided to double down on the branding, bought the .io as their primary domain etc.
Another aspect was pricing (IO addresses are more expensive to renew than a .com at $40-60/year vs $10-15). Now for most companies that’s a rounding error if they’re in venture capital lifecycles but it also worked as a natural filter for the low-value .info/biz spam farms. Just by being more expensive it had some degree of curation/prestige factor around it so there was at least a chance it wasn’t complete garbage? Plenty of scammy crypto projects have been quick to dispel that notion but there is definitely some signal there. The catch being that you mostly see these domains being used by US-based companies. The Alexa lists also have disproportionately few .io addresses from Asia or Latin America for that matter. Probably just cultural reasons/inertia but there also wasn’t the same marketing drive in those markets to pick up .io usage.
Another curveball I wasn’t expecting was the gaming community co-opting it as well which also wasn’t totally surprising when you think about it. Agar.io, Slither.io, Diep.io, all these viral browser games that came out a few years ago. The gaming category loves short domains especially for games where you want people to be typing the address directly into their browser bar. Short domains is always going to be a limited and scarce resource on the internet and in many ways .io ended up having a very large pool of short memorable domains that were still available when .com became completely saturated. So here you get this wave of IO games that enter the mainstream that further propagate awareness of this extension beyond just developer subdomains or tech startups.
One thing that isn’t talked about much is the fact that British Indian Ocean Territory is kind of a political hotspot, there are these indigenous peoples the Chagossians that were forcibly removed from the islands in order to set up this kind of government arrangement. The sovereignty over the islands has been hotly contested and there have been multiple lawsuits over the years. So in a weird way every registration you make in .io is directly funding and supporting this kind of arrangement. I don’t think it’s something most registrants think about when they’re looking to buy a .io but it’s worth noting that it’s in the background.
Slightly tangential but there is a not-so-small irony in “ethical tech companies” using a ccTLD that’s technically assigned to a disputed territory that has a non-UN member government. The Chagos Islands have a long history with the UK and the displaced islanders claiming that Mauritius should have jurisdiction (ongoing UN disputes over this). The moral is don’t look into it, half the tech world is in denial about this. The .io registry (Internet Computer Bureau) is a commercial operator of the domain extension so most website owners are not directly culpable but there are darker undercurrents there as well.
The caveat is that it is extremely concentrated in this tech/startup space if you filtered Alexa top million io sites by category you would see very strong concentrations in the software, web service categories, cloud infrastructure, development tools, not a lot of drop-off outside that area to like more mainstream retail companies, traditional businesses. Which is to be expected given the branding but also reinforces the idea that .io is very much a niche despite the popularity that it’s carved out. .io has very much found a certain identity and that identity is simultaneously a blessing and a curse.
BestDates hits different honestly—like it's one of those platforms where people actually show up ready to connect instead of just lurking or ghosting after two messages (you know the type). The whole vibe is built around transparency which sounds corporate-y but really just means profiles feel real, not like some heavily filtered fantasy version of a person, and the verification process weeds out most of the sketchy accounts that plague other sites. Communication tools are solid—video chats, voice messages, the usual text stuff but it all works smoothly without constant crashes or that annoying lag that kills momentum mid-conversation. What makes BestDates kind of low-key popular is how many users stick around instead of bouncing after a week; there's actual activity, real profiles online at any hour so you're not shouting into the void. The matching system isn't perfect but it's way better than random swiping through endless faces... benefits stack up fast when you realize time isn't wasted on dead-end chats or fake profiles trying to scam you into clicking sketchy links.
