One of the first things you’ll do when you get your great idea is a domain name search… and experience the disappointment when you find it’s gone. But never fear, this is not the idea-shattering catastrophe it first seems.
This is because your clever name doesn’t matter. There is a seemingly strong counter-argument, that goes “…but, brand is crucial – look at how much all those big companies spend to make you remember their all important name!”. This is true, however before the names existed (outside of their inventors heads), they weren’t special because they weren’t attached to something anyone cared about.
The poster site for this is del.iscous.us.com or whatever they’re called (del.icio.us – online bookmarking). Do you think when it launched in 2003, then was venture capitalised (2005), then acquired by Yahoo 6-months later, that it mattered that it was doing all the no-noes in naming: one, it was hard to spell; two, it was unrelated to the site’s purpose; three, it was not the standard .com; and four, it ridiculously used “del” as a subdomain. This liability is of such marginal importance that Yahoo didn’t even get around to buying the delicious.com name (I imagine at some outrageous price from the previous owner or squatter) until mid-2008.
So how did they get away with breaking so many rules?
- People don’t speak as much anymore, so when someone mentions they found something cool, they send a link via email or Skype or IM twitter.
- Google is search engines are used by so many people that the url doesn’t even matter – in fact, the first five results of my horrendous name-mangling effort above return people who have spelt their link text wrong – but still have the correct underlying URL.
- By following rule two (unrelated to purpose) above – URLs like del.icio.us still work even if people did speak to each other (outrageously breaking rule 1), because it is a distinct and real word (despite the domain hack).
To sum up, whilst I’m not arguing that having an ideal (pronounceable, distinct, simply spelt, .com) domain name is useless – I’m saying that it needs to go back to the bottom of your to-do list again, and again – ’til you’re so successful you can trivially buy out or sue the nasty domain squatters – who you first thought “ruined” your grand idea.
Tags: domain names, web