Copio e incollo direttamente da www.flippa.com ed aggiungo che un altro punto di interesse per l’estensione .io è l’uso  già diffuso come abbreviazione per Internet Organization. Quasi superfluo ricordare la valenza intimista che .io ha per noi italiani.

La popolarità del dominio.io non sembra essere solo tra le start up: anche le grandi aziende come Google, Apple, Microsoft, Disney si stanno dotando della magica estensione. Una nuova moda attivata dalla penuria di domini.com, ma che si sarebbe potuta diffondere autonomamente già dal lontano 1997 quando l’estensione fu creata per distinguere i siti nazionali del British Indian Ocean Territory.

So why .io?

There are reasons why these domain prefix has recently become so popular with businesses, individuals, and shrewd domain investors…

They’re short, sound good, and .io domains perform well in Google’s search results. The reason for this is because they’ve been added to the geotargetable domains list.

IO has become one of hottest domain name extensions for startups. This is a little peculiar, since .IO has existed since 1997 and was originally assigned as the ccTLD for British Indian Ocean Territory. So, why are startups turning to .IO?

With .IO, startups can get short and memorable names, because .IO has great market potential. A .IO domain name can be a better option than coming up with a long and confusing domain name that uses a more established extension. To put it simply, .IO’s are an easy way to get a great domain for a great price, and .IO has a handful of other defining benefits.

The Benefits of Using a .IO:

1. It’s a unique extension compared to generic TLDs, which can help a startup stand out from a marketing perspective.

2. It’s shorter than three-letter gTLDs, while being different, which makes it easy to remember.

3. In the tech and software development world, I/O means input/output, so .IO is particularly relevant to that audience.

Working with a .IO also became easier than ever this year, which contributed to the spike in adoption rate. The .IO registry, nic.io, switched its back-end to allow faster domain transfers and modifications. Nic.io now uses a standardized authorization code procedure that’s the same as .COM, .NET, and .ORG.

European Start Up Accelerator Reveals Latest Startups and 7 out of 16 of them use the .io domain extension.