Hmmm because our primary target (middle aged women) are not that web-savvy i guess, and the .com is the default TLD. We bagged sleep.io when it first went on sale but haven't considered using it as the default.
To ask the opposite (and possibly stupid) question - why would you make sleep.io the default?
Somebody was in the news the other day because their clever country-code TLD was taken away by the registry. All of the country code TLDs have weird restrictions with which you can easily fail to comply. Recourse for smaller registries can be harder to obtain.
In this case I'm not sure why they went with 'sleepio' if they weren't going to use '.io' other than perhaps it's trendy right now, but I think they probably made the right move getting the .com.
I just noticed it redirects from sleep.io is all. It seems like while .com's are great, having something like sleep. whatever is pretty awesome. I was just curious as to why you chose one redirect over the other.
We decided that while we wanted to capture the .io domain for completeness' sake, for the reasons listed above (SEO implications, not "correct" usage of TLD), sleepio.com made more sense as the default / redirect target.
Answered a similar question the other day. Webmaster tools doesn't let you target .io domains globally, as it's intended for the Indian Ocean countries. Therefore it won't rank as well as a .com in the Google serps, which is a big disadvantage.
