I've actually made the mistake myself of building up a site without owning the .com. I've bought sites that don't come with the .com. If it's a site that depends primarily on search engine traffic, it's not that big a deal.
However, when the site crosses the line from being an unknown that gets traffic from search only to becoming a brand, then you're doing as much to increase the value of the .com that you don't own, as you are your own site.
I can't tell you how many times I've had people tell me that they're sorry that I closed down my
Coin Talk Forum, for example, because they went to the .com and didn't find my forum. And, if 100 people (just making that number up, it's probably higher) took the time to tell me that, how many didn't bother to tell me? 1000? 5000?
Forums have a hard enough time retaining members without loosing them because they assume it's always going to be a .com. Several of my forums have branding problems like this, and I'm needing to make radical changes to address it, in order to take them to the next level.
So, how can I address it? (or, how will you address it if you develop eDiscussion.net without owning the .com)? Well, I can approach the owner of the .com and try to buy it. Sadly, our own success works against us there; a domain that may have been worth a few hundred tops, is now worth thousands more because of our success. Moving to a new domain is an option too, but very disruptive.
