"Branding," as the process is called in conventional media, involves finding a central symbol around which to associate images of your products or services. "Built Ford Tough" and "teenfucking.com" are both highly refined brand identities, remembered and re-used by customers worldwide.

Measuring Value

The simple value of a good domain name comes in three ways:

• People will remember it easily.
• It resembles a dictionary entry.
• Search engines and intelligent agents will find you more easily.

When potential customers are first contacting your business, a crucial step is having a clearly identifiable path to repeat the successful action. The customer who associates a memorable experience with a certain word or symbol will easily convert from first-timer to regular. This is the first value above.

The second is even simpler: any word or sequence of words, when viewed from a World Wide Web browser, looks like an authoritative dictionary entry phrased in a sandwich of "www." and ".com". Customers remember the basic format even if they know little about the Internet or WWW and so can find a likely choice by wrapping this simple formula around a dictionary world. Since current browsers will automatically complete URLs from user input in this style, it is doubly important to have a simple and direct name.

The search engines and category indexes that serve as our only form of reference listings on the Internet use domain names as an indicator of likely relevance to any number of topics containing words used in those domain names. For the large segment of the target audience who depend on these, a domain name can make the difference between a connection or dead end. This third value alone justifies the cost of most Internet domains.

The Future

Doubt of the lasting importance of the Internet has faded as its usefulness in selling products and customer direct marketing has demonstrated its utility time and again. Choice-based media has revolutionized the industry much as the VCR did in the 1980s, allowing customers more options with lower promotional expenses for distributors.

For example, the U.S. Department of Commerce recently released a report claiming that 100 million people had used the Internet in 1998, a statistic likely to rise to one billion by 2005. Similarly, a report from Activmedia, Inc., "predicts that global ecommerce revenues will top USD1.3 trillion by 2003, in keeping with the projections from other established research houses." The significance of these figures is not lost when one considers that by "2002, 25 percent of the expected $37.5 billion in Internet retail sales, not including autos, will have originated on affiliate sites," such as those which use a catchy domain name to point toward a service site.