The Dr. Seuss Jumble: Naming Web Sites
Could it possibly be true? Has all wit and cleverness already dried up in the naming of Web sites, less than 15 years after the Internet was opened to the public? — In the beginning, Web sites announced their own names.
Context & Ripple Effects
The column lands at the tail end of a running argument about name exhaustion on the web. The Wall Street Journal made the scarcity case back in July 2006 with its report that the good domain names had all been taken, and the Times now extends that claim from availability to creativity itself: less than fifteen years after the Internet opened to the public, it argues, even the wit in web naming has run dry.
That framing matters because naming was supposed to be the cheap part of launching a site — 'in the beginning, Web sites announced their own names,' as the piece recalls. If both the dictionary words and the clever twists are gone, the cost of standing out moves upstream into branding and downstream into whatever a company pays to acquire or approximate a name.
First-order effects
- Companies naming new web properties in late 2007 are working against a double constraint — unavailable plain-English domains per the 2006 reporting and, per this column, an exhausted stock of obvious wordplay — pushing them toward coined, misspelled, or Seussian names by default.
Second-order effects
- Scarcity converts names into tradeable assets: holders of short or memorable domains gain pricing power over buyers who cannot mint a clean one, and naming consultants or brokers sit between them capturing the spread.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, pressure accumulates on the domain-name system itself — either through paid secondary markets becoming the normal route to a usable name, or through calls to widen the namespace so that scarcity stops being structural rather than incidental. Which of those wins is genuinely unsettled from where we stand.
The trend: Web naming is shifting from free self-announced labels to coined or purchased ones, as the first-come land grab exhausts the obvious names.