This is why domain or brand names don’t really matter.

If you ever started a new business/company, or thought about doing so, you probably spent a good amount of time coming up with the “perfect” name.

Naming your brand is hard. It’s like naming your child.

I love coming up with names.

I spend quite a bit of time thinking about them whenever I come up with a project or a short film. But I’m also very much aware that domain names don’t matter. That’s why when the people behind Bloop.com came up to me and tried selling it to me for a quarter Million dollars, I said no.

Well, that was one of the reasons…

You see, Bloop.com doesn’t have any inherit value on its own. The same goes for Google.com. The people behind Google were the ones who put the value into Google.com. Before that it was just a funny word. So getting Bloop.com wouldn’t do much to my brand. Yes, it’ll be nice to have a 5 letter one word domain name (they are rare these days), but it won’t improve my business.

I’ll take it even further – Animation.com. Would I benefit from owning this domain? Well, think about yourself. How do you act as a reader/consumer?

Do you go to Shoes.com to buy shoes? Books.com to buy books? Computers.com to buy computers?

I’d say no.

In fact, there are very few websites in which the domain name completely describes what the content it, and they are usually very spammy (think best-laptop-reviews.com).

A bigger lesson here, I think, is that brand names in general matter very little. Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Zappos (and also, my own brand – Bloop) – they are all meaningless without the work that went behind making then a valuable brand.

Next time you struggle thinking about the perfect brand/domain name, maybe instead try thinking about all the hard work you’ll have to put it to make that name matter.