According to a post by momlogic.com, there is a trend for parents to name their children based on whether the name is avalible as a .com.
In part, the story says:
“Registering a domain name year-by-year can be costly for 18 years — and who knows what’s going to be out there when your child is of age?” she ponders. “We could never have predicted MySpace 10 years ago nor would we have reserved a MySpace user name, right? Perhaps in 18 years teens will be broadcasting from their cell phones or something! I think we can choose their names, but like a lot of things during their lives, we have to let them choose what site/service/screen name they want in the future.”
This is not much of a surprise.
If you go to the Social Security Administration and look up the top 1,000 boy and girl names for 2007 you’ll find that all 2,000 .com’s are taken.
Actually we started doing this years ago.
You can see the value in a good first name. Susan.com sold yesterday for $50,000. Patti.com (patti is not even on the top 1,000 girls list for 2007) sold for $12,000.
Popluar last names have also sold well over the years when available at auction.
Well, something could still be out there some people . If your first name is taken you can still use a combination of your first and the last name and see if it hasn’t been taken. I wasn’t that lucky though
After spending hours checking the WHOIS, my wife and I decided to name our first born kalaju if it is a boy and and kelaja if it is a girl.
hehe… so we will start naming our childs xyzwq or something like that in 5L. nice 🙂
We registered berkens.com years ago and I got to tell you when you give someone your e-mail address its pretty cool and memorable.
Great post – it is for sure a clever way to make money = domain name + Baby Name
Way back when, my brother bought Jonathan.com for his son who is now 15 and has built a popular blog with it.
I regged both of my kids’ names when they were born… FirstLast.com
Whoever does not do that won’t be able to soon, if they even still could now. I tried to register a few for a friend of mine’s kids but had to use a middle intitial for one kid – and they both had unusual first names.
What about doing the opposite, buying a top domain name and naming your child after that?
I see a next generation kids running around named SevenMile.com, Cowboys.com, and Pizza.com.
Conor
I think Gwyneth Paltrow tried something like that a few years ago, until she realized that apple.com was taken
Somewhat related question: do you have a personal rule of thumb for comparing the value of a .net name to a .com first name. For example. Susan.com sells for $50k, then the .net is worth x-y% of that (5-10%, or $2.5k-5k)? Thanks.
Mountain
In general it our opinion that a .net is worth no more than 5% of a .com but that is only if its a great name.
Look at sex.com 12M, sex.net 425K, porn.com 9,5M porn.net 400K both sold in the same year.
However once you get beyond great .com’s, the 5% rule will shrink fast
Mr. Berkens –
Thank you.
I have another question for you, if I may…..this time further off topic from the initial post. Most Wanted Domains has a couple hundred spanish names in its inventory. Do you have a similar, very general x% rule of thumb for spanish name values, compared to english names, such as casa.com vs house.com? I’ve done a little comps searching, but I didn’t uncover any direct comparisons. (For kicks, I used estibot to compare 20 random, common terms in spanish vs english. The results ranged from 2% to 33%, with an average around 10%, which seems quite high to me.)
From a newbie, thanks for your great blog and insights into the domain world.