Thoughts on Domain Acquisition and Branding using AI
ByCreating a good brand is one of the hardest tasks of an entrepreneur. Aaron Patzer, CEO of Mint, stated that you should “expect to pay $3 to 15k for a 6-8 letter, single word, English domain name.” In fact, he paid $180,000 in equity for “mint.com”, which took over three months of negotiation. A domain name should be spelled unambiguously to prevent losing word-of-mouth referrals. Sean Cheyene of Herbal Ecstasy believes that brand is everything. Without the brand name, it would have been nearly impossible to create a $350 million dollar company from selling a plastic baggy with herbal pills — with no reputation and money.
Today, there are 88,312,535 million top-level “.com” domain names registered, which makes it difficult to purchase a domain like “efax.com”. (To put this in perspective, Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary has 475,000 words.) Thus, any combination of existing words we come up with for a “.com” domain name will probably be taken. We can browse existing domain names for sale at sites like BrandBucket, where they have “brandable business names and unique domain names”. However, a domain name like “Zables.com” goes for $5,000 and I am still not happy with that name. Perhaps then, a good indicator is to look at expiring domains, which I can try to bid for — for only $69.
I recently stumbled upon Namejet, which receives over 16,000 soon-to-expire domain names per day. I can bid on these domains, although it’s difficult to navigate through the list and find a good name, thanks to it being filled with domains like sxwzjhxx.com. Also, we have biased and limited searching capabilities. For example, if I am looking for a real-estate domain, I would try all possible combinations of keywords related to real-estate (as would every other person building a real-estate website) — then find that the names that I’m interested in are overpriced and difficult to win.
Since a company’s success can greatly increase from a good domain name (think Mint vs. Geezeo), I decided to use my machine learning knowledge and build a predictor to determine the probability that a given domain name resembles an English word: P(w=domain_name). After downloading then sorting 340,000 domains with a “score”, I found reasonable domain names with ease: flipcast, drawmash, idealix, shopvolt, swerp, raideye, geekleaf, wirednut, moccah…just to name a few. (I computed the probability score using n-gram letters. If the first 3+ letters of the domain matched the dictionary (e.g. shop in shopvolt), then the probability for that section of the domain is set to 1.0 to handle transitions such as “pv”, which are not found in the English dictionary.)
While it’s still difficult to find a domain name for a specific product, I just found meaningful domain names for a streaming video website (Flipcast), a creative company (Drawmash), a gaming company (Raideye), a shopping CSE (Shopvolt), and some new blogs (Geekleaf, Wirednut). Win.
Hey Ryan,
Any chance of popping the code for this on GitHub? I’d love to run it myself and see what falls out the end.
Cheers!
Sure, I’ll clean it up and post it somewhere soon.
-R
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If sourcing it is not an option, how about a once a week, you list 10 domain names you’ve generated?
Hell – just start selling domain names..
Dumb question, but the 340,000 domains you scraped were recently expired/expiring domains?
I like your methodology, I’ll definitely check it out when you post it.
They were soon-to-expire domains at http://www.namejet.com/Pages/Downloads.aspx.
-R
Any progress on releasing the source code?
Thanks
Nick
I’d LOVE to see the code for that. Any updates on where it might be hosted on GitHub?
-Dave
This is interesting, but it’s statistics and text parsing, not AI.
This is considered statistical natural language processing, although very simplistic. “NLP has significant overlap with the field of computational linguistics, and is often considered a sub-field of artificial intelligence.”
A depressing thought is that most of successful machine learning resorts to a simple statistic. The complex methods are interesting to think about, but w/ a large enough data-set, the simpler the better.
Excellent advice. I’ll post a link in this podcast on my blackboard website for my students. All you could said works well with message boards too.