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There's a lot of traffic that's driven to generic domain names. Article here: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_26/b4040059.htm http://www.busin

There's a lot of traffic that's driven to generic domain names. Article here: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_26/b4040059.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_26/b4040059.... Best excerpt: They bought control of beer.com for $80,000 in 1998 and built an audience for the site by giving out free e-mail addresses and having fans rate different brews. Less than a year later, they sold it for $7 million to Interbrew, a beer company. The pair then bought creditcards.com for $100,000 in 2003, created a comparison site for credit-card offers, and sold it to a private equity buyer for $2.8 million in 2004. Now that it's valued by some at several hundred million dollars, they admit to selling too soon.

axod 19y ago
That's different though. That is building a site and driving traffic to it. Those successes would have happened just as well with other domain names. Sure, the fact they were generic probably helped a lot on exit, because people rightly or wrongly still see them as a big advantage. Fact is, pizza.com doesn't get any traffic. They will have to spend a lot more money making it so that it does get traffic. For example, you could either spend $2.6m on a generic domain, and spend another say $2m on building a site/marketing etc, or you could register 'somethingpizza.com' for $10 and spend $4m on building the site/marketing. I'd put my money on the second option. But I guess it depends if there's someone else further down the line that believes it's worth say $3.6m, then you make a profit out of doing nothing.