 |
Well, remember
each Domain Name is unique. Then there is that key word prestige. Most businesses
in Japan would want a piece of land in downtown Tokyo to plonk their headquarters.
Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, "land, they are not making any more
of it." So there is a shortage of central Tokyo land. Hence the hot price
of Tokyo real estate. |
 |
| So to it goes with
"mental real estate." You may have noticed that every commercial net entity
seems to want a Dot Com. There are a few rebels and net service providers
which seem to like a Dot Net, and not-for-profits seems to like Dot Org,
but by and large if you were to name a prominent Internet company it would
be "name (X)".com. |
| You may have also
noticed that the big players commonly have a short snappy word in front
of their .com. Domain names like Yahoo.com, Amazon.com, Dell.com, etrade.com,
pets.com, register.com, sun.com, realtor.com are so much the norm that when
you see NewHomeNetwork.com it looks the odd one out. |
|
Nowadays, as the
Internet is currently on track to have 200 million plus domains registered
by the year 2003, with tens of millions of Dot Coms alone registered already,
it is proving hard to get a short snappy URL (Unique Resource Locator, the
techie word for a web address). |
|
| |
This shortage of
snappy URL's is due to several unavoidable facts of scarcity. Firstly, if
you want the Tokyo skyscraper of domains, a common English word such as
www.dog.com or even www.fluid.net, then forget looking at a fresh registration.
There are after all only 8,000 words in the average educated persons vocabulary.
Similarly, if you want to go for a pronounceable short made up acronym such
as deja.com or dala.com, then you will find that all alphabet combinations
of four letters and less are taken (however, for quite a while five letters
and up will remain available because of the exponentially increasing hundreds
of thousands, to millions, to billions of extra possibilities that each
additional character adds). |
|
| |
Well why don't
new companies just register dejak.com or dalax.com? A large part of the
answer is prestige, the shorter and more 'generic' (common) words in Dot
Com show that you were here on the net in the early World Wild West days
or that you can afford to pay big bucks to buy your domain name business.com.
The other part of the answer is "high memorability." |
|
| |
The shorter a URL
the less characters you need to type, so the easier it is to remember. Yet
also this is a reason to get a powerful English word such as Amazon (.com),
as you don't have to remember� "was it amazonshop.com or amazonstore.com"?
Memorability is also the reason for the final major aspects of domain scarcity:
Industry Size. If your name describes the product you deal with such as
loans.com for a loans company then it is usually more memorable to site
users, who can then find you again amongst the millions of other Dot Coms.
And by this Industry Size criteria loans.com is clearly more valuable than
carloans.com. |
|
| |
So what we end
up with as a basic way of gauging a domain name's worth is� short+generic+Dot
Com+industry size=shortage+prestige+expensive. |
|
| |
That's the basics
of the domain name resale market! Since this re-sale market has now become
a billion dollar industry some of you may have nearly fallen asleep reading
these basic notes, or be asking "what about name (X).com�.". If this is
you, we have a critique of this often quoted valuation formula as we too
believe it has limitations in its over-simplicity; |
|
| |
Domain
Name Science�.The Details---> |
