gericsb said:
This is fun--
'patients' refers to a huge demographic of our population at any one time. I believe the 's'-plural-in this case is a huge benefit and will make the domain much more valuable. Think of men.com vs. guy.com.
I think this will go for at least 100K at SnapNames and will resell down the road for ten million (I know I'm reaching here, but...) I just wanted to make a prediction so I can come back here and say 'I told you so...'
:td:
There are 650,000-750,000 english words listed in unabridged dictionaries. This does not include over 500,000 scientific terms which would put the word total to well above 1 million. It is difficult to quantify relative name values, but I'm willing to bet that if someone said I could have 25,000 dictionary .coms of my choosing, patients.com wouldn't be on my list. Why? Although, it is a relatively common word, it is very limited in scope and in it's range of uses.
The plural form is searched 138 times/da on WT and the singular form gets only about 60 searches more. All but one of the 2 word terms that show traffic use the singular, "patient"- "patients sex" being the only plural word comination. "patientsafety", "patientcare" and "patientsatisfaction" would be preferable to "patients", IMHO, and these two worders receive basically the same or even more traffic than does "patients".
The big question is- How would the name be used? I haven't seen any comments or answers to that question, yet. I, (we all), can figure out some ways to use it by s-t-r-e-t-c-h-ing the imagination, but I see nothing that would intuitively draw me to the name, unless I was a Dr or a hospital administrator, and that is a fairly slim demographic relative to "business" or even "fish", which is a multi-faceted enough to offer several strong possibilities for it's commercial use.
Of course, "patients" could be branded, but anything can be branded w/ enough financial backing. Is it a wise business move to pump a large promotional budget into a name that is this unintuitive and narrow in scope? Not IMHO. $10M is overpriced for this name and the auction represents another example of speculators not looking beyond a dictionary word attribute of a domain name and losing perspective of the real world functionality and effectiveness of the term they are paying for. I can't see a very cost-effective return on investment for this term. The auction feeding frenzy is more the result of the low number drops of common .com words, faulty comparisons that are being made w/ other, superior .com dict. words and, to a lesser extent, assumptions that are being made about the names worthiness due to it having a thematic link to the healthcare and medical fields.
Snapnames has got one h~ll of a racket going w/ this type of over-priced, high profile auction. Less than two years ago, by being the first in line to "claim" the drop, you would have paid Snapnames $60 for this domain name.
