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Thanks for your response RyanKent. You're right, we aren't totally unbiased, but we can offer some perspective from being in the industry. We really do recommend considering purchasing the TLDs for your target markets because once someone has purchased the TLD you want it can be very difficult (and expensive) to get it from them even if it is a trademark-based domain. Plus owning the ccTLDs of your target markets gives you the option of building out those sites if you desire. Otherwise it is just as easy to forward any additional TLDs to your main site.

We're a domain registrar and we definitely recommend trying to purchase your domain name in as many TLDs as possible to avoid copyright issues later on, but if you don't want to build out sites for each domain, you can simply forward your other domains to your main site. That way you still capture the traffic that goes to those TLDs and send them to your main site.

You should keep in mind that if you are targeting a certain audience, for example, the UK, Google will rank .CO.UK better for searches coming from the UK, so that could be handy if you decide to break into certain markets outside of the US. It really depends on the market you are targeting as many countries outside the US consider .COM to be "too American."