The nay-sayers might not like it, but short/brandable domain names are here to stay.
I was looking through TechCrunch today and saw a whole bunch of websites using short/brandable otherwise meaningless domain names.
Ooyala – a video technology company committed to providing publishers, advertisers, and content owners with syndication and monetization solutions for high quality video.
Akoha – Large numbers of people playing together online to bridge differences and allow a wide range of diverse people to engage in shared social goals like never before. Motto: Come play it forward.
Mixtt – Join with your friends. Post upcoming social plans. Connect with other groups. Go out and have a good time!
Yammer – Twitter for the corporate world. What’s happening at your company? Share status updates with your co-workers.
Zong – Zong enables you to bill and deliver content to 500+ million mobile subscribers across the US and Europe.
Joost – Free online TV – comedy, cartoons, sports, music and more.
The list goes on. Even though people would like to think 3 or 4 word, meaningful domain names should be the norm, short/brandable domain names are the way to go. Why? It’s a heck of a lot easier to get people to remember joost.com then something like populartvshowsonline.com. It’s as simple as that. The power of association will do the rest.
Do you own any short/brandable domain names?
I just picked up fwackoo.com for a steal too.
I think next will be pickledonkeyknife.com
hi, you are right!
I came across DomainNameDollarStore.com recently.
Had a good laugh and just for fun, I hand registered Jubool.com 2 days ago.
I am agreeably surprised by the traffic it has received so far.
(fuelled by the funny Video I guess!)
but I also think that meaningful domain names have great potential. Specially when they are, for example, sentences we use in our everyday conversations.
do you fancy…
the best curry in the world.com ?
Regards,
Ihave to agree with naysayers. These words will be hard to remember and spell,
difficult for voice recognition bots, avoided by media for fear of
embarrassment
by mispronounce and take a lot of advertising and marketing expense before
anyone trusts them. At least amazon was a word and ebay is easy to spell and
relates to the equity in the bay area city slang where they are based.
Brandables and short phrases can be good but they must also pass the dictionary
test as well as the international extendable test as we live in a Global
market.
When your brand gets stopped at the spellcheck, it’s a bad sign.
Amazon, iTunes and eBay are good examples of short brandables. Something like
Vehix.com which has spent seven years and tens of millions of dollars only to
still be heard as “bx.com” when the back is turned to the screen during
commercial, is a bad choice.
Those short domains that u gave here are different from the domains criticised by dailyblogtips.
These domains here are reasonably rememberable/pronouncable, some are even quite kool like josst. but the domains mentioned over there i think quite bad.
All those companies (1) started at a low budget, and (2) all are Internet based.
You probably know that it’s impossible to get a decent .com domain name today as basically everything has been registered already, mostly by speculators whos aim is to make large profit from domain realestate.
It is much easier to take a gibberish word, which also available in the .com, and brand it.
Despite the hard to spell issue, I think these sites represent a strong trend that shows creativity works. Flickr. Genius. Has worked well … but would Flicker.com have worked as well. Not sure. Would it have given it an advantage? Hard to say. Some, including myself, might say the clever spelling of Flickr was part of its viral identity. I found this site. It’s domain is different. It’s new, exciting, etc.
Again, u shouldn’t compare flickr with some really meaningless, hard-remember, hard-pronounce names.
But i understand the problem some less funded startups r facing. Maybe we have to accept some nonsense names appear more.
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This is a great post. I have a bunch of brandable, short domain names left at http://www.comcloset.com.
Check it out and let me know what you think!