Certainly not. Despite the fact that irc.com would be blocking yourself into a specific protocol and not building a brand, I doubt anyone here has ever thought to go to irc.com.
I think building it around irc.com would have actually worked against me. People see <familiar word>.com as mostly holding pages/made for adsense sites, as well as being "web 1.0".
I did buy a domain - ircatwork.com. I bought it because it had users and traffic - things that are worth money.
While generic word .com domains attract lots of traffic which is good for banner farms, it hasn't seemed to have much of an effect on which businesses are on top of certain markets. I mean, who the heck is 'search.com'? And would anyone have thought 'google' would be a far more important term meaning search than 'search'?
