Back in the day, before people understood how the web worked (or was going to work), those people generally assumed that recognizable nouns would (somehow) correlate to higher organic traffic -- as if someone looking to buy pet-related items would think to type "pets.com" into his URL field.

Search engines rendered that logic laughably naive, but I still think there could be some ancillary value in (noun).com as a recognizable and easily recalled domain name. I wouldn't overpay for one, but I wouldn't pass one up if the pricing made sense, and if I had actual plans to do something productive and value-adding with the name. (Buying domain names to squat and flip, under the "Greater Fool Theory," is a game I wouldn't recommend playing.)

On the other hand, the biggest non-technical challenge with buying a generic noun as a domain name is trademarking. Picking too generic a company name is setting oneself up for an uphill battle in today's trademark landscape.

Right, so sled.com is probably pretty good, but webserver.com is probably useless. Sled could easily be the name of an app (totally unrelated to sledding of course), but Web Server can't be anything because it's too technical to be useful for anything not related to web servers and too general to be useful for anything that actually is related to web servers.

Agreed. The value of something hyper-specific and enterprise-sounding (webserver.com) is dubious at best. In the B2B sales and service business, having a generic domain name doesn't carry much upside, and what little measurable upside it does confer will be outweighed by downsides (such as the difficult registration and enforceability of the trademark).

Apropos of nothing, a domain like truestory.com is an interesting tossup. At the expected going rate of $25k+, it doesn't appear to make a lot of sense. But if someone were going to buy this name and develop it as a blogging or magazine format, I could see some value (again, barring trademark difficulties). As a writer and aspiring publisher, I'd scoop up this domain if it were priced within reason: say, the $1k-$5k range, tops. As a businessman, I'm a little gun-shy about the price tag.

Yeah, a good real-life example is hover.com. It's a domain registrar that has nothing to do with hovering, but it's a nice short dot-com that is pretty memorable.

webserver.com could be a nice personal domain for a blog or something, especially one related to http, etc. Though I would agree that the price it's going for seems inflated.

The reason (noun).com domains are desirable is for SEO purposes. A few years ago, it was really easy to rank highly in Google for whatever keywords where in your domain name. For example, if you wanted to rank for [digital cameras] your best bet was to buy digitalcameras.com or some variation of that name.

As SEO has gotten more and more complex, exact match domains (EMDs) don't work quite as well anymore but are still a pretty big ranking signal [1].

For somebody worrying about long term brand appeal, an EMD might not make sense but for somebody launching a new ecommerce store or doing affiliate marketing EMDs are still a great asset to have.

[1] http://mozcast.com/metrics

EMD domains have lost most of their charm. Google's been giving them less and less preferential treatment over the past year. With a recent update some of my EMD sites took a big hit just for the EMD keyword - went from #1-#3 to second page.

> Those seem valuable at first, but is that still the case?

Probably not. The only one that springs to mind is diy.com, belonging to UK DIY retail supplier B&Q.

But no-one thinks to visit that domain, so in literature they have to suffix it with 'the website of B&Q'...