I actually fully agree. I originally chose that copy to reflect how good our prices are relative to the "old guard" domain markets, but it's too unsubstantiated of a claim. I've replaced this copy with something better. Thanks for the constructive criticism.
Every startup name will have pros and cons to varying degrees. None will individually be perfect. The Strong & Weak examples are to spell out the extremes of many positive and negative criteria so that you have a base level to compare against.
That was the purpose of linking to the Fred Wilson blog post comment. It covers almost everything you just mentioned. This post is an outline for others to handily reference.
I completely agree. Something to keep in mind is that the domain name system is almost unlike any other commodity -- in that only one of each exists, and it can never be replicated.
For example, no matter how rare a baseball card is, there is almost always a few others of its kind. Same with comic books, and so on. Now, no matter how rare an antique piece of furniture is (let's say it's a one-off, hand-made piece), you can still replicate it with enough attention to detail to nearly fully mimic the original.
But, with a domain name, there's only one. And, you can't mimic it. (You can get the .co, but that's a whole other story.) Consequently, domain owners have a lopsided amount of haggling power.
As both you and I already hinted at, you can get a name in a different TLD (or even prepend "get", e.g. "getAPP.com"), but you're taking a hit for a variety of reasons (perception, confusion). My point was only that you won't ever replicate it, and for that reason domains are unique.
My personal favorite "fallback" is to use .io or prepend "get."
But I would absolutely stay away from any cctld's like .io. If your site becomes popular you will end up having to purchase the .com assuming you even can do that. (Once publicity of your .io site gets out the price of the .com will go up if it's even possible to buy).
One side of the problem is that "only one of each exists", the other is that many entities might 'need' (more or less) this very name, regardless whether we talk about local (eg. 3 bookstores in one small town) or worldwide.
I imagine with system (resources on the internet) getting bigger and bigger single, nice, short and memorable domains will gradually become less important.
I imagine factors like location aware, user aware, use of bookmarks, search, links attached to social profiles, NFC, qr, AI algorithms, you name it, will each play a role here.
There could be moment in time when everybody will accept change of 'paradigm' and accept that addressing resources is not the way it used to be, or that it is 'many ways lead to the content' . We could even use bare numbers for lots of stuff.
Also, this reminds me that people used to share domains back in 90's with a nice intro and screen split to two parts - you would choose which company/site you wanted to go. Sure its not the solution by any means, but I liked those sites, always getting some positive feeling that this was possible (people agreeing on sth). I have not seen such a site for a long time, though.
Art and people (sports, movie starts) are two I thought of instantly. And the insane, somewhat arbitrary (although it's always whatever someone is willing to pay) pricing of those makes domain market look clean and efficient.
The comparison of domains to sports and movie stars (when it comes to being un-replicable and heavily influenced by taste) is very interesting. Maybe I'll start telling people that domains are like movie stars :)
An interesting question that then arises is what would be the equivalent of "character actor" in the domain world?
Much appreciated. Good idea re. pricing. It's actually in my to-do list to talk about that, as well as SEO/SEM (and what I've learned by plowing through nearly $1,000 on Facebook/Microsoft/Google Ads).
Cool. I'd guess that SEO/SEM for a domain name business would be incredibly important, but I could be wrong, and your real-life experience would be interesting.
