Your domain name is the .com, .net, .org or some other dot something that people use to get to your web site. Affiliateblog.com is mine. A group of investors headed by Jake Weinbaum (the guy behind Disney's go.com) paid $7.5 million for the name Business.com back in 1999, aiming to make it a showcase B2B site. According to their own press they have succeeded. Yes, it's a terrific name - short, sort of descriptive and easy to remember. There's some cachet there, but is it $7.5 million worth? That cäsh could have bought a lot of promotion or branding for whatever name they could have had for ten bucks, or a hundred, or two hundred grand. Your domain name is the .com, .net, .org or some other dot something that people use to get to your web site. Affiliateblog.com is mine. A group of investors headed by Jake Weinbaum (the guy behind Disney's go.com) paid $7.5 million for the name Business.com back in 1999, aiming to make it a showcase B2B site. According to their own press they have succeeded. Yes, it's a terrific name - short, sort of descriptive and easy to remember. There's some cachet there, but is it $7.5 million worth? That cäsh could have bought a lot of promotion or branding for whatever name they could have had for ten bucks, or a hundred, or two hundred grand. Each year for 15 years The first $500K in profït goes toward amortizing the cost of that domain name. That could also pay for a terrific affïliate program, a truckload of banner and PPC advertising, and a nice BMW lease for Mr. Weinbaum (who probably doesn't need a BMW). But the Business.com thing has set off a wave of domain name speculation that staggers the mind. People are snapping up domain names and ransoming them off to wide-eyed entrepreneurs with business plans and dreams of riches. Being a hardcöre capitalist I am torn about domain name speculation - I am tempted to applaud the person making a buck by getting there first and grabbing up the good names, but I am annoyed at the restraint of commerce that takes place while someone negotiates with one of these guys to get the right name. So if I look at the top 50 websites on Alexa, most of them should be easy to remember names, right? Wrong. I would argue that only one, match.com, is an easy-to-remember name that describes what the site is about. I keep hearing that the reason these so-called generic or descriptive domain names are so valuable is that some people just type domain names into the address bar of their browser rather than using a search engine. This fact seems to be intuitively false. I find it hard to believe that someone looking for information on a particular business would type in www.business.com. Furthermore, if I look at the top 50 websites on Alexa only one, match.com, is an easy-to-remember name that describes what the site is about. I wondered how many people actually type in their address bar (address bar?) instead of using a search engine anyway. I didn't find the answer, but Jupiter Media tells me that 64% of people looking for something use a search engine. That means that 36% of people use something other than a search engine. What makes me believe that people typing stuff into their address bar doesn't happen much is this simple fact...of the people using search engines last November, 43% searched for common websites like Ebay. In other words, instead of typing in www.ebay.com, people Googled Ebay and clicked on one of the results. That is absolutely hysterical. And totally believable.
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Domain Name Insanity
