Why People Still Pay Thousands For Domain Names

I never understood why anyone in his or her right mind would spend thousands of dollars on a single domain name.

It just never really made sense to me. I would understand the need for a simple domain name like car.com, if this was still the mid 1990’s where people had to type in a domain name directly. However, with the invent of Google and Yahoo, nowadays it is borderline insane to pay anything more than a hundred bucks for a domain name.

I recently found a published a list of domain names and how much each sold for.

The highest selling names:
cameras.com
flowers.mobi
forclosures.com
mortgage.net
vb.com
sailboat.com
sexeducation.com
creditcards.net
own.com
university.org
hb.com
fun.mobi
credits.com 95000

Thats just crazy!

Hold on one sec for those of you with dollar signs in your eyes! Not to sound pessimistic but you are probably about 7 years too late and lack deep enough pockets to purchase enough good domains to get any kind of ROI.

Now that your back to reality I can tell you that there is a better way to come up with domains.

What really sets domain names apart today is how memorable they are.

I repeat. What really sets domain names apart today is how memorable they are.

How do I come up with a better domain name?

You can either try coming up with a domain name yourself or you can pay a company to do so.

Coming up with one yourself?

Combine two simple words
Take a look at YouTube. Two simple words with the tag line “Broadcast Yourself” which is golden because of its implied meaning and connotation to the words Tube and You.

WordPress is another one. When you think of press you think “publish,” so WordPress must mean that I can publish something.

Change the spelling a bit
A googol is the number one followed by a hundred zeros. Google wanted to organize the worlds information online. So they changed the spelling and Google.com was born.

Use an acronym
Yahoo stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” Pretty geeky, huh?

One of my favorite startups, Meebo, used this method even though its the acronym for an older project that the founders were working on and has nothing to do with instant messaging. “Mouse Exonic Evidence Based Oligonucleotide” in case you were wondering!)

Algoco, the service lets you make money from surfing the web, stands for “A Global Community.”

Still can’t think of anything good and available? Pay people to come up with one.

I’ve done both and have noticed that large web design firms usually charge a boat load for only 2-3 people who work for the company to generate a few domain names for you to pick from. Another rip-off if you ask me.

If you are going to pay someone to come up with a domain name, I would recommend a service like Clever Site Names where you submit a description of your website and a whole community of people generate custom available domain names for your business. Its usually pretty cheap and best of all if you don’t find a domain name you like, they will refund your money.

As you can see, you have many options when coming up with domain names besides paying thousands for a parked domain.

Simple, one-word domain names do not necessarily perform better. What matters more is that your website is useful and has a memorable name.

Why do people keep paying thousands for domain names then? The answer is beyond me.

-E

(sources Moniker, Freewebs, Meebo, WebRankInfo)

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