The Unemployed Alcoholic Blog

There is a ton of hype about investing in “generic” domain names. As names keep becoming scarcer and scarcer, this trend is certainly bound to continue. However, what exactly constitutes a GENERIC name? Is the distinction between generics and non-generics as clear as black and white or is it more of a range with a threshold? Or is it just a continuum? I tend to favor the latter definitions. On the more generic side, you’ll have things like names of cities and names of very specific, physical items… i.e. “jackhammer” What these terms represent will be very lucid and very unequivocal. The more terms you begin to add to your word combination, and the less meaningful the connection between them becomes, the less “generic” your word combination will become, and thus, these names will have less inherent value.

In general, I would define a “generic” domain name to be a word or a combination of words that is popular (used often in society), meaningful, and which evokes a rich schema (associated links, related terms and concepts) in the mind of the reader/visitor. Another requirement, is that changing the word, or any words in the combination (as well as changing the order of words), would result in a significant loss or alteration of the original associations/schematic links. For example, if jackhammer is a 9 or a 10 (not necessarily a perfect score because a significant percentage of the English-speaking population may not know exactly what one is), something like FairyTaleLove.com, one of the names I recently registered, would score a 7 or an 8 on the generic domains scale due to the potential variety and potency of associated concepts in the visitors’ minds. Something less so… maybe a name such as ScarceAssets.com (also one of my recent acquisitions) would be in the 3 to 5 range. The meaning is not as potent, but with moderate development efforts, the name could *BECOME* generic in the future because it is inherently meaningful and evokes grouped lists of discrete concepts and other terms/items in the visitors’ minds (it is the marketer’s job, of course, to then leverage the evoked schemas for maximum customer persuasion). Going further down the spectrum, a name such as RedefineTechnology.com is maybe a 2 or a 3 since the terms “redefine” and “technology” are rarely ever used in combination (though there is a sliver of intended meaning somewhere in there, which keeps the name from going down to a 1 or a 0). Such a name would require significant development to become valuable. This is reflected in its currently poor estibot valuation: “USD 30″

Let me know if any of this makes sense.

I do not presume to attack the “generic” concept, I only seek to make the definition of a “generic domain name” more lucid. How “generic” a name is, is just one of the variables in proper domain name valuation. There are others. I expect to cover many of them in future posts. More on this later.