First of all the basic difference:
YouTube.com is the top-level domain name (TLD). This is the original domain name for the YouTube service. YouTu.be is a country code TLD (aka ccTLD). The .be domain name have been assigned to the country of Belgium.
.com, .org, .net are the most common domain names. As .com signifies a domain name for a commercial entity, the YouTube founders originally chose YouTube.com for their video sharing service. This domain name was registered on 14 February 2005. In 2006, Google acquired YouTube and in 2009, Google launched the YouTu.be domain name. Here .be stands for Belgium. Although .be is ccTLD of Belgium but there is no rule that bars non-Belgian entities to register a .be domain name. So, Google did register this .be domain name for global purpose. ccTLDs can be registered by anybody in the world and for any purpose. In a number of instances, ccTLDs are registered for a different purpose than to signify the country name. In case of YouTu.be, Google did a play of letters. Similarly, a number of television related websites have .tv domain name. But .tv domain name does not signify television! In fact, it has nothing to do with television. .tv is the ccTLD for the country of Tuvalu.
But why did Google Create YouTu.be?
In 2009, Google registered YouTu.be as a way of shortening the YouTube URLs. At that time the micro-blogging websites (especially Twitter) were becoming popular. These websites allow people to post messages composed in small number of characters. For example, Twitter allows one post to contain a maximum of 140 characters. Therefore it was important to shorten the YouTube URLs as much as possible so that people can easily share them on popular websites like Twitter. By launching YouTu.be domain name, Google cut short the URL of a video by 15 characters. Take a look at the following illustration. It demonstrates how a YouTu.be URL is 15 characters shorter than the equivalent YouTube.com URL.
Google could further shorten the YouTube URLs if they could reduce the number of characters in video ID (the LIgRmdJMgl4 part in the above illustration). But, as you know, YouTube is a massive video sharing platform. To uniquely identify each video, Google needs an ID with a sufficiently large number of characters. So, Google can not compromise on this part. But by creating YouTu.be domain name, Google smartly saved 15 characters. Twitter loving people would easily understand the importance of this saving! We hope you liked this article. Please share your views, comments and questions. We will try our best to further assist you. Thank you for using TechWelkin!
