Eye on the Web: Nabbing the Right Name for Your Domain

Andrea Dudrow

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What does a name say about who you are? If you’re a flesh-and-blood person, chances are it doesn’t say a lot. My name, for instance, is Andrea. Three syllables that give no clue as to whether I’m nice or mean, garrulous or shy, clever or vapid. My name is not “column-writing-woman,” or “she-who-keeps-cats,” both of which would do a better, if more awkward, job of describing me than the simple Andrea. If you’re a person, this is okay. If you’re a Web site, however, this is not. Or at least prevailing wisdom says it’s not, if the frenzy of the domain-name scramble is any indication.

Back in the good old days of the Web (meaning five or six years ago), it was relatively easy to register a domain name, partly because it hadn’t occurred to many people to do so. You called up Network Solutions, which until 1998 had a government-sanctioned monopoly on the domain-name game, and you told them what name you wanted. For a mere $35 a year, it was yours. Things have gotten more complicated since then.

Federal Assistance
In 1998 the government set up a non-profit private sector corporation called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN to you and me) and charged it with managing the process of registering domain names. ICANN, which is chaired by Internet luminary (and Webby Awards judge) Esther Dyson, doesn’t register domain names itself, but it is in charge of approving or denying applications of other companies that want a slice of the lucrative domain-registration pie. So far, they haven’t rejected an application.

Even with an army of companies joining the game, Network Solutions maintains a vast majority of the domain registrar market share, having registered upwards of two thirds of the 19 million plus domain names purchased to date. The company doesn’t have the most pristine track record either, having regularly bungled the process or bogged it down in bureaucratic sludge. In fact, last year someone registering the domain amateuradultmovie.com (hoping to sell it on the sometimes lucrative secondary domain name market) ended up being listed as the administrative contact for America Online in Network Solutions’ vast “whois” database . To make matters worse, Network Solutions (which was bought in March by Verisign for a whopping $21 billion in stock, making it one of the highest-priced acquisitions in the tech world) wants to resell expired names without first putting them back into the public domain.

All of this has helped fuel the rush for what some people consider prime Web real estate — that is, a domain name that will either net your online business a bunch of customers or net you a bunch of cash when you resell it, presumably to a buyer who wants to net an online business a bunch of customers. Which brings us to the domain-name reselling game.

Second-Hand Goods
There are a whole bunch of companies, also approved by ICANN, who are allowed to re-register domain names. These folks go out and buy up names they think folks will want (things like madonna.com for instance) and try to sell them at a profit. An obscene profit. A quick search yesterday revealed that the entirely too-clever domain blowitoutyourass.com is being offered by a company called, inexplicably in this case, GreatDomains for $20,000. Other sites offering such mouth-watering fare include DomainReseller, Afternic.com, and register.com. But is there any money in this? Perhaps. The domain Business.com, for instance, in November shook even this overvalued market by selling for $7.5 million.

For a staggering look at just how many already registered domains are out there (and a sobering look at how few host actual Web sites) check out DomainSurfer, which lets you search the database of 19 million names (and counting) for any combination of words or letters. This can be fun. A friend and I regularly make bets on whether random strings are already registered and then look them up on this site. So far, nearly all the gems a person might want to register — including thenextbigthing.com, hypocrisy.com, webutante.com, and, of course, blowitoutyourass.com — have been taken. Which isn’t to say these names aren’t for sale on the secondary market, just that we can’t afford them.

What’s in a Name?
But just how mad is all this madness? Will business.com really garner its founders more hits than, say, www.wackoswithcash.com? Sure, there are folks out there who will type cats.com or help.com into their browser’s navigation bar hoping to be magically transported to just the right site. But these folks have proven themselves to be in the minority, if you ask me. Look at Barnes & Noble. They own the domain books.com, but this hasn’t kept them from playing second banana to the oddly named Amazon.com. In fact, almost all of the most successful sites on the Web have relatively random names. There’s Yahoo.com (yeah, that says Web portal to me), eBay.com (not marine biology online, but auctions), and the latest big thing, Google.com (which sounds downright goofy. Or googly.).

When it comes right down to it, a domain name often doesn’t say any more about a site than a person’s name says about their personality. Conversely, it is that personality or that site that grows to say something about the name. When you think of books, you think of Amazon, even though the name is seemingly unrelated. And when you think of women who write columns about the Web, you think of Andrea (right?), even though there’s nothing inherently Web-like or writer-like about the name. So how far will a good name get you? Apparently not as far as a good product and good marketing. Keep that in mind the next time you’re tempted to take out a loan to finance your oh-so-necessary purchase of Igottabeme.com.

Read more by Andrea Dudrow.