What does “.io” mean that is attached to the end of some video games titles and website titles?
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The Internet has a big dictionary called DNS that keeps track of what computer goes with what name, like reddit.com or twitter.com or whatever. [1]
In the early days of the Internet, the last part of the name (the TLD [2]) could only be picked from a very limited number of choices, that were mostly three letters. Some of those original choices were:
– .com for the for-profit COMmercial sites
– .org for charitable ORGanizations
– .edu for EDUcational institutions like schools and universities
– .gov for parts of the GOVernment
The “.com” really captured the public’s imagination when ordinary people started getting access to the Internet. When someone talked about “pets DOT COM” the “dot COM” part tells you that it’s a website on the Internet. So to this day, most businesses prefer their websites to end in dot com.
But over the years they expanded the system with more TLD’s. Every country would have a two-letter TLD: France would get .fr, Russia would get .ru, America would have .us, Japan would have .jp, and so on.
– If you want a .com site it’s expensive
– The really good .com names are already taken
– Every country in the world gets its own two-letter TLD.
– Each country sets its own rules for what sites can get that country’s two-letter TLD.
Most countries say your site has to be based in, or somehow related to that country, to use the country TLD (e.g. if you don’t live in Japan you might be unable to get a .jp site).
But not all countries do that! Small countries like [Tuvalu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvalu) (population: 10,000) or the [British Indian Ocean Territory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory) (population: 3,000) have country codes that are catchy branding in English, and they encourage foreigners to register domains. If you’re making an online video site, you can call it something dot tv (TV, television, people will know it’s a video site). Or if you’re a computer nerd, you can call it something dot io (as in computer IO, input/output).
So that’s where IO sites come from:
– The site owner is a trendy hipster who thinks “.io” is good branding (originally due to being the term for the computer related concept of input/output, but now just because a bunch of other sites are also io).
– They were able to get a desired site name cheaply and easily by avoiding “.com”.
– .io is used in games because some people name their game after the website. (Branding! You don’t need to buy / download / install the game, you can just open a website and play! What website? The name of the game itself tells you the website!)
– This is all possible because the tiny British Indian Ocean Territory controls the “.io” country code and lets anyone make a site with a .io name (in exchange for a small annual fee) even if they and their website have absolutely nothing to do with the British Indian Ocean Territory.
[1] Actually it’s multiple dictionaries. And some of the dictionaries refer to other dictionaries. It’s a core part of the Internet with a complex technical and bureaucratic history.
[2] TLD stands for Top Level Domain. Because to find out what computer coresponds to a name, you go through the dotted parts from right to left. “Hey where can I look up a .com site? You want Bob, he knows all the .com sites. Hey Bob, where can I look up reddit.com? You want Joe, he works for Reddit and knows all the reddit.com sites. Hey Joe, where can I look up www.reddit.com? Ah it’s computer number 10.234.5.67 you want.” That way, by reprogramming Joe (who is a computer), Reddit can make its own sites — like old.reddit.com for ye olden Reddit that doth not suck, or mail.reddit.com for handling the email of Reddit employees, or whatever.
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