I think that generic words are by their very nature less memorable.
books.com can be very easily confused with book.com. And it becomes a very
difficult branding to sell when the name of your company is just "book".
Interestingly Barnes and Noble owns book.com but markets themselves at
bn.com.

Personally I find myself forgetting "sold.com.au" and instead looking at
"tradingpost.com.au" and "ebay.com.au". Oddly, the generic word is less
memorable, even though tradingpost has the most annoying search engine.

So, when Cereal Pty Ltd tries to market themselves, how do they do it? What
does the average person call them? "That cereal company"?

We need to clearly separate two concepts here:

1- people using the DNS as a directory service and typing in a general word
2- people trying to guess a domain name from the name of a company they know

Personally I believe that the first concept is insignificant for all but a
very small number of businesses. Sure it might generate a little traffic,
but good reputation is worth a lot more than that.


Ari Maniatis






on 20/12/01 4:14 PM, Kim Davies at kim§cynosure.com.au wrote:

> I think there is however a value in having memorable domain names that
> are short, easy to pronounce, with no confusion. These are properties
> generics have. Sure, computers.com might not be a valuable commodity
> in itself, but if you build a valuable business around it I think
> computers.com would be better than something more complex.



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