During the last couple of years there’s been a gold rush for domain names. You know what I’m talking about. Most often you need a domain name and you know exactly what domain name you’d really want but no-no, the name is already registered and you have to settle with a name that don’t feel that great or not even is close to your initial idea. Bummer.


You’ve probably ran in to the companies out there who do nothing except register domain names and sell them to a much higher price than what they bought them for. In the media you can read about global corporations that spend millions of dollars on domain names. You probably regret that you didn’t foresee this hype for ten-fifteen years ago which would have made you a millionaire if you’d have played your cards well back then.

I guess that theese names actually can be worth all that money today but what I wonder is if they will be worth it tomorrow? What we experience more and more on the web is that the content on your site is what’s important, not the address to your site.

According to Wikipedia, the actual purpose of a domain name is to “…provide easily recognizable and memorizable names to numerically addressed Internet resources”. That’s true, it is much easier to remember a domain than an IP-adress. According to http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/ you can see that there’s over 100 million different registered domain names today (I haven’t double-checked the numbers, we all know there’s many domain names registered and that’s enough to prove my point (= ). That amount is only including the major top-level domains. No wonder it’s hard to find an available domain name and many sites gets a domain name that don’t really reflect what their company name is or not even that they do.

Because of the increasing amount of different domain names and the massive increase of content on the web no one really remember the domain names anymore (maybe except from big corp sites such as facebook, youtube and so on). Many just use a search engine to find what they’re looking for and I see that more an more people actually google for sites they know the address to.

Domain names are important to search engines today but if the web is going where we think it’s going we can really wonder if domain names will be as important in the future as they are today. Will they even still be used in twenty years from now?

/Simon