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Topix.net is a news search engine that was founded in 2002 and is owned by Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune. The Topix.net founders have also been the creators of the Open Directory Project, which is the largest human-edited web directory. Topix.net purchased its .com domain from a Canadian company for $1 million earlier this year and is now going to rebrand their site as Topix.com. Now the company is afraid they might lose their good Google search engine ranking when they move the site from the .net to the .com domain. About half of the traffic to the site comes from search engines, so a decrease in search engine traffic might also result in an equal decrease in ad revenue.

Developers can learn an important lesson here: If you are going to create a large website or online business, you should not start the site if you do not have the .com domain name, because in most cases a domain acquisition is more expensive and causes more headaches after the launch and promotion of the site than before its start.