What’s next for domain names?

Such is the sorry state of company naming these days.

Tech company after tech company is slipping into a bulging diaper of infantilism by taking a snippet of baby talk as its brand name. Why? Because the dotcom domain name was available.

The trend is reaching critical mass. We are assailed by so many nonsense brand names that they have become another burble to our oversaturated, overmarketed brains. Individually, the names are gibberish. Collectively, they are white noise.

To understand how we have come to this point–and more importantly, to understand where domain naming will go from here–it’s important to see where we’ve been.

In the beginning IEEE and Al Gore created the Internet, and it was good. When corporations realized just how good the Web could be for business, they acquired domains and named them after their company: ibm.com, hp.com, apple.com, microsoft.com. At that time were only three generic TLD’s (top level domains) available: .com for commercial entities, .net for network infrastructures, and .org for noncommercial organizations.

In addition to the brick and mortar companies establishing their Web presence, the Internet was inundated by enterprising companies looking for a way to monetize this great new thing. Some of them were pretty good at branding and chose a decent company name, which was also their domain name: Amazon.com, PayPal.com, Travelocity.com.

Others saw dollar signs in grabbing up generic domain names: pets.com, houses.com, etoys.com, freeinternet.com.

The dotcom bubble burst in the late 90’s, of course, and many of these generically named companies went down with it. (Interestingly, many of these generic names are now owned by branded companies. Pets.com, for example, was purchased by PetSmart.)In the year 2000, other TLDs were released (.us, .info, .tv, .biz), but by that time, people were pretty much conditioned to think of the .com extension as the most important, most credible type of domain name to have.

The tidal wave of companies that emerged in the new century began plundering available .com names at a frenetic rate. Also significant were the domain name speculators, who have purchased–and are sitting on–tens of thousands of valuable one-word “dictionary” names. Today there are more than 64 million domain names. According to some experts, every prima facie, properly spelled word of up to six characters is now unavailable with a dot com extension. Or, perhaps even more alarming, others say that 98% of all dictionary words are now unavailable as dot com names.

Like any property in finite supply, prima facie domain names have become extraordinarily valuable. Business.com sold for $7.5 million. Sex.com traded hands for $12 million. Not every one-word domain name will command that kind of money, but companies who need to buy a one-word dotcom domain to match their company brand name will likely shell out tens of thousands of dollars, if not more.

So what’s a company to do?

Choose a word and tweak the spelling (Flickr). Frankenstein a brand name (Agilent = agile + -ment). Or just make up a word. Any word will do. The goofier sounding, the better.

As long as we can get the .com domain name, they think, it’s all good.

Except now there’s such a proliferation of made-up, incomprehensible, misspelled and vapid brand names, the potential distinctiveness of each individual name is largely lost. Every new gibberish name is just another drop in a great big bucket of twaddle.

But there’s hope for companies seeking a memorable brand and a strategic domain name. Our oversaturated, overmarketed collective consciousness has created opportunities for naming by companies too smart to go down the road of meaningless brand names.

Crusher’s no-nonsense solution...

Crusher is a scrappy new online invitation service now competing with the likes of Evite. Launched in 2007, Crusher came late to the tech party and found that, like hundreds of other startups in their shoes, they could not secure the prima facie domain name that matched their brand name.

Instead of changing their brand name to a trendy nonsense word, the founders of Crusher improvised by spelling their domain name with a touch of leetspeak (or l33t, for you purists): crush3r.com. Not a bad solution, considering the young demographic of its target market.

Here’s how they tell the story:

Why the “3” in the URL? Because all plain English words were already taken. Believe us, we tried hard to get CRUSHER.com but the folks sitting on it weren’t returning our calls. “Please, we don’t need the whole word. We already have most of it. We just want to buy a vowel!” exclaims Doug …(dial tone). And we’re not about to settle for a made-up name like every other start-up out there. We were set on the name “Crusher”, so we went with CRUSH3R.com for an address. If you dislike the number three we’ve got a back-up for you. We figured if we can’t have the word, then we’ll have it twice (: …you can go to crushercrusher.com and find us there as well.

Fortunately, the confusion over forgettable, unspellable domain names has helped usher in a new behavior that will, Google willing, cause a trend back to comprehensible brand names. In short, we’re seeing less direct input of URLs into the address window of a browser, and more navigation by way of search engines. In 2006 “Yahoo” was the most popular search term in Google. Imagine that. Instead of entering yahoo.com into their browser’s address bar, countless users chose to enter it into Google’s search window instead, then click from the results. There are several explanations for this growing trend. People have learned not to trust their spelling. Unlike direct URL input, in which a misspelled address will most likely result in a visit to a domain squatter’s site or 404 page, a good search engine will suggest related spellings. Pure habit. People are used to using a search engine to find things, so that’s where they turn first. Using a search engine for navigation won’t leave incriminating URLs in a browser’s dropdown history. More people are installing the Google Toolbar and similar search widgets into their browser, making it quick and easy to perform a search. It’s quicker to type “ebay” than it is to type “www.ebay.com” or worse, “http://www.ebay.com”. Many users don’t know that Firefox automatically adds the .com, nor do they realize that “www” is seldom needed. Regardless of why users are now navigating more via search engines, this is good news for branding. Why? Because it means the prima facie name is no longer as important. Most users understand that there are too many Web sites with similar names. Rather than waste time entering an URL that may turn out to be the wrong address, they’ll use a search engine instead and find the site they’re looking for by way of the meta description.

So now, it’s more important for a brand name to be memorable, distinctive and relevant than it is for it to have the prima facie dot com address. If I remember the approximate brand name and the category, I can find anything as long as the brand name is unlike anything else in its category. Case in point: Fuze, my current beverage of choice. I won’t find it at fuze.com. I would never think of accessing it at drinkfuze.com (its actual address). But I can find it on the first page of results by entering “fuze” into a search engine.

If I misspell it “fuse”, one glance at the search results tells me I’m not even close. So I enter “fuse” and “drink”–and there it is. Even misspelled, I can find it on the first page as long as I know one other obvious, pertinent term. I hope we will soon see the end of nonsense names and made-up words spawned by the fever to secure the prima facie dot com domain name. The gold standard for brand naming can and should return to the basics: A name that fits the brand positioning, that’s memorable, that’s easy to say and spell, that’s provocative and distinctive and trademarkable. Remember: You’re naming a company or a product, not just your Web site. Always do what’s best for the brand, not the URL

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