Musings at the intersection of business and life

Oooooc: What's in a name?

Starting a Business
July 22, 2009 by Kathleen Allen

Have you recently tried to get a domain name for your new company?  If you haven't, let me fill you in on the facts.  The chances of your getting the name you want is zero and zip.  Sorry, that's the truth. Unless you're going for something a bit nonsensical such as Zooomr, or Oooooc, you going to find a veritable wasteland of possibilities.  A recent Inc Magazine article reported that the total number of domain-friendly words in Project Gutenberg, the online dictionary was 95,434.  Of those words 66,849 have now been registered as .com domain names. "All the normal words in spoken English are taken," the article reports. 

There are actually more than 800 times the number of domain-friendly words registered as are in the Gutenberg online dictionary.  But if you're desperate for that perfect domain name, you might just find it on Sedo.com and Snap-Names.com for anywhere from several hundred dollars to several thousand.  For example, right now you can buy mouse.com for $350,000.  Of course, you might want to do a cost/benefit analysis before you pull out your credit card. And you might want to check with your users or customers to get their opinion.  What's in a name?  Maybe nothing, maybe everything.

Related tags: domain name, start-up

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