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What's in a [domain] name? Would a reddit by any other name smell as sweet?
1 point by sokoloff on Aug 22, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
Thinking solely of the impact of the domain name for a given company name, consider the following:

Suppose the company name for some hypothetical checkers afficiando site is "King Me". What are the relative merits of the following domain name choices?

kingme.com king-me.com king.me king.me.com kingme.net kingme.org

Presuming the venture has profit motives, is the choice of domain name at all relevant to the likelihood of business success?

Assuming one of those domain names were available in the primary market, and your first preference were domain-parked on sedo, what would you be willing to pay at sedo?



Ultimately the domain doesn't determine success. It's still really nice to have a .com -- I'd say you should try and find a .com that is available and don't pay squatting fees. It's just not worth it. You definitely don't want a -.

.net really isn't great, but it won't make or break your site. I'd rather have a .net domain than one with a -. Here's some domains I found on instantdomainsearch that were available.

kingedout.com kingedup.com kingedoff.com checkeredking.com kingscheck.com checkerking.net kingsrow.net checkermate.net checkersmate.com

kingme.com is an awesome domain name though -- if you have the money and it's around $500... go for it. $10k is not worth spending your own money.


You could use the y.XX domain to secure the naming you like (e.g. del.icio.us) supposing the first order-name (yXX.com - e.g. delicious.com) was taken. Then after getting enough users, testing, and funding: you could then afford to buy it out from whomever owned it or is squating on it.


Wouldn't your success push the price up?




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