Some nouns have rarely-used plurals.
I’ve acquired domain names to start businesses, and I’ve talked to lots of entrepreneurs when they were selecting their domain names. In some cases, they have their eye on a great one or two-word domain name.
A question inevitably comes up, particularly for nouns: what about the plural/singular? If I use this great domain for my business, will a competitor use the singular/plural version of it for their business?
It’s a legitimate issue. Sure, you can start a business on car.com. But someone else will start one on cars.com, and there will likely be some confusion.
Some nouns don’t have a natural plural, though. They are only spoken one way in practice.
An example is my domain name CandyCorn.com. If you eat a handful of candy corn, you say you “ate candy corn”, not “ate candy corns”. So if someone wants to use CandyCorn.com as a brand for their marketing firm, a name for their app, or something else, they don’t have to worry about also securing the plural version.
“Candy corn” has 20 million+ results, “Candy corns” just 370k.
This is one reason I like my recent purchase of Shortbread.com. Again, while you could say shortbreads, it’s a rarely used form of the word with about a half-million results in Google. The singular version has 28 million results.
It’s somewhat rare to find nouns that are almost exclusively used one way or the other. But when you come across one, it’s worth paying extra for them.
Since the Booking.com decision, I have had no less than three situations in which the owner of one form (be it plural or singular) has taken to threatening the owner of the other form with a trademark action of some kind – usually coupled with a sparkling new filing at the USPTO.
Questions about these sorts of situations used to have a much simpler answer.
But if you own a singular (or plural) domain name being used for goods or services for which the dictionary word is directly indicative, and you are being threatened by the owner of the plural (or singular) domain name being used for the same purpose, then you will immediately realize why some of the bizarre celebration of the Booking.com decision was entirely misplaced.
Well said, John.
Interesting post. Why do I eat beans for breakfast, but never porridges or toasts? I don’t know. The hard decision is when registering or buying domains like achiever and achievers. Sometimes you need both.
Nobody really wants to try and brand on a plural unless it is a particular domain that actually works on a plural, eg say NewWorlds.com where the plural term is sometimes used as a brand. In 99.5% of cases this has no effect on valuation because the plural will just be an EMD that no business would use in 2020.
Having said that Shortbread.com is a killer domain.
what a kiss ass !
You are negative about almost everything…and shortbread.com is finally what you deem to be worthy of “killer domain name” status.
LOL
Yutz.
It depends on how the domain is being used: as a brandable or an exact-match description. I’d take diapers.com over diaper.com, cars.com over car.com, etc. if I were creating a site about the domain’s topic.
You are stating the obvious.
The real takeaway….for some reason there are 370k searches for the nonsensical term candycorns