jsomethings

Safari already blocks most third-party cookies, yet Google Analytics works in Safari. An explanation of how GA pulls it off can be found here: http://webpolicy.org/2012/02/17/safari-trackers/

This is the company naming article you're probably referring to: http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2012/04/22/before-naming-...

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.

First line of the article: "I’ve learned a lot from the development of NameLayer, and I’m ready to divulge every trick in my arsenal." Pretty upfront.

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.

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?

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.

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."

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.

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).