"Mint’s product had an instant edge because of how its name branded it–a simple, easy-to-spell dictionary word, alluding to both the manufacturing of money and that fresh, clean taste."
I think that's actually somewhat low as a dollar figure for the domain. It probably could have been sold for at least $300k in cash. Having Ron Conway and First Round Capital as your investors probably gets you better deals.
There are some WTF names like Apple Computers, or obscure acronyms like IBM. Specifically English words like MySpace are great for English-speaking customers, not so much for others. Invented proper names like Google should better be short and the Google example has the downsides of an English word since it sounds way more English than Japanese. 'Great' depends on context of course.
I would say Twitter is great because they use the metaphor consistently (tweets, the bird icon, the egg avatar).
For my own project, I will take the least bad name whose domain I can buy. People will get used to it eventually.
True, it's always tough to judge a name of a company that has already taken off. You'll either like it because of hearing it so much or dislike it because you think you'll have a bias if you went the other way. The truth is that you'll have a bias no matter what you choose.
I think Ooyala is beautiful. It's a bunch of ex-googlers, I like to think the "oo" carries that. And it's an abstract name, which is ok given their business (not end-user). According to their materials, "Ooyala means cradle in Telugu, a Southern Indian language."
[i don't know anyone at Ooyala, I just found them on the web]
Try mentioning it in a conversation to someone, and then asking them to spell it. Total nightmare. Despite Ooyala having pretty serious traction, very few people have heard of them. As someone who used to work there, I'm convinced that the name is a huge strike against them on this front. When people ask where I've worked, I first ask them if they've heard of Brightcove, and then say that I worked at Ooyala, which is their main competitor. Much easier to explain:)
BTW, my father _still_ can't pronounce Ooyala properly, after 2.5 years, nor can a lot of people I run into in the valley.
Based on that experience, here's a couple rules I go by when naming products/companies I'm involved in:
- It has to be easy to pronounce.
- It has to have a completely unambiguous spelling.
- An average person should be able to spell it based on hearing it once.
You shouldn't have to say that you work for "Ooyala, spelled o-o-y-a-l-a". That's just embarrassing.
The problem I have with .co is it's so similar to .com. If somebody sent me an IM containing "deel.co", I'd probably assume they meant deel.com and just missed the last character.
They spent $2m buying it, and it was a superb piece of branding.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10457870-36.html
"Mint’s product had an instant edge because of how its name branded it–a simple, easy-to-spell dictionary word, alluding to both the manufacturing of money and that fresh, clean taste."
http://www.dotweekly.com/mint-com-founder-speaks-of-branding