Name Awards

If names were all literal

Every week as a professional namer I see people struggle when they can’t get names that are very descriptive of their products or services. Yet so few famous brand names are .. so for Xmas fun, lets award some name prizes to names that would have rather different connotations if taken literally.

For example, Safeway is a great name for a condom company, StarBucks is good for the name of a bank in Hollywood, Microsoft is very fine bathroom tissue, and Oracle could be the Toastmaster’s Club or local church.

Why don’t you think of some more and suggest them, especially after a trip to shop for Xmas.

P.S. Shouldn’t FritoLay be the name of fresh eggs? Look at the logo too!

Dr. Seuss jumble of awful names

This week’s name award goes not to a name, but to David Pogue, a great columnist of the NY Times who recently posted a good article on the garbage coming out of automatic name generators.

More importantly, he called out the companies like Doostang, Wufoo, Bliin, Thoof, Bebo, Meebo, Meemo, Kudit, Raketu, Etelos, Iyogi, Oyogi, Qoop, Fark, Kijiji, Zixxo and Zoogmo that are launching their Web 2.0 sites with these names. We couldn’t but agree more with him that the future of such companies is probably non-existent – unless they will only be dealing with aliens from outer space.

I guess that means they could work as gaming sites. But for the rest of the world, creativity is not ended. There is an endless supply of names that are a lot easier for humans to understand, use and embrace, even if they are not in the dictionary. But they are made up by humans with much smarter brains and resources.

What is a domain worth nowadays?

Recently I had a client who considered buying a domain name for some strange idea he had. As is often the case nowadays when you see it come up with a number of links only on the page, it was hosted at Sedo. The seller was quick to say it had been professionally appraised and that is why the price was $24,000. He also quickly snapped up all the .net, .org, etc. variations once he got this inquiry.

Well guess what? My client had it appraised by Sedo themselves and GoDaddy.com (probably the two biggest services in the business) and their average price was just under $2,000.

Yes, lots of domains are being bought and sold, but most for sale are worthless. The average sales price ends up being somewhere about $1,500. Sure there are still occasionally the jackpot names out there… but they are few and far between.. and have proven revenue capabilities or are really needed for a new brand name.

This latter case is very rare though when you consider that you can get a good professional naming agency to come up with a new name for a corporate account for less than $6,000. (Even much less for a small business or small proprietorship startup). And that price includes full legal registration, trademark checks and matching .com domain name!