To Name a Website

At least three quarters of our cycles at GDK have been spent on a website that is currently in stealth mode. Naming this site proved to be quite a challenge.

Almost every interesting domain name as well as any domain name related to an interesting domain name has been taken. Since our website is in the celebrity gossip space, this is doubly true. Any domain name with the strings celebrity, celeb, gossip, or hollywood is taken. Domain squatting goes largely un-prosecuted and as such scooping up myriad domain names and selling them to desperate small business owners is a big business.

To drive home this point, let's examine the domain names of some of the major players in this space:
1) PerezHilton.com (The owner likely decided upon the Paris Hilton inspired pseudonym after hours of searching for a domain)
2) Celebitchy.com (Hey, at least it rhymes with something they actually wanted)
3) TheSuperficial.com (I actually like this one, the name vaguely articulates what the site is about)
4) wwtdd.com (Obscure Fight Club reference. At least the domain is short)
5) DListed.com (I have no idea what this is supposed to refer to) (ed note: This is a reference to a Kathy Griffin joke about not being on the A or B list of celebrities... she is on the D list. Keith should know this. Bad, Keith, bad.)

The list goes on. The point I'm trying to drive home here is that it requires some serious creativity to find a domain that a) conveys what the site is about and b) is catchy and clever.

After a few depressing hours spent looking up hundreds of would be company names, we finally decided to get serious and hosted a formal brainstorming session at Dan's house. Armed with a whiteboard and beer (to get the creative juices flowing), we started writing down every word or phrase that we felt our site was about. We then combined them in interesting ways and looked up the resulting expressions on the domain registration database. What did we find? Zip, zero, nada. Everything even remotely interesting was taken.

After sending emails to the owners of a few domains we really liked and being asked for 6 figure sums in return, we grew increasingly desperate. We started experimenting with creative misspellings of some of our favorite phrases. We quickly glommed onto the word "nooz". Nooz.com? Taken, of course, in 1997 no less. How about noozler.com? Bingo.

We like that "nooz" is a playful riff on the word "news", similar to the way that celebrity gossip is related to real news. The "ler" suffix allows us to brand around a concept that we like.

But best of all: noozler.com was available for domain registration.