Generic Domain Names

I was catching up on some reading this morning, and I wanted to share two articles about financial startup businesses who have raised significant funding and are using brandable keyword .com domain names.

According to CNBC, a company called Ripple has raised $55 million in funding from several large banks. The company has also been backed by Google Ventures. Crunchbase shows that Ripple is closing in on raising $100 million in total funding.

Ripple uses

Over the Fourth of July weekend, we had a BBQ for a group of friends and their families. We had  a bunch of lawn games set up, including a game of ladder golf. To make a long story short, we bought the ladder golf game from one of the big box stores at the last minute, and the quality sucked.

I enjoy playing ladder golf on the beach, and I thought it would be a good idea to find a good quality ladder golf set for the next time we have people over. I did some searching and ended up seeing who owns LadderGolf.com. As one might expect, LadderGolf.com is a website that sells ladder golf sets as well as spare and replacement parts and pieces.

I love the idea of LadderGolf.com. The exact match domain name is perfect for the product it sells. People who visit LadderGolf.com or see LadderGolf.com know what to expect when they type it in to their browser. It’s

The founder of  Help.com  was listed in this year’s Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30  list composed of the “best and brightest young entrepreneurs” under the age of 30. Doug Hanna is a 24 year old who founded Help.com in 2014.

According to the company’s twitter profile, Help.com is “building the next generation of customer service software.” Help.com is an intuitive domain name that is perfect for what the company is offering.

The Help.com domain name is a fantastic url, and it was obviously expensive to acquire. The Inc article touches on the topic of cost, but it doesn’t share much detail about the acquisition price:

“Another knack Hanna evidently has: choosing domain names. Figuring a moniker like Help.com could set his company apart in a competitive space, Hanna tracked down its owner and negotiated a deal. He won’t say how much he paid, but he admits: ‘A lot.'”

The Whois record for Help.com went private in January of 2014, but prior to that, Help.com was owned by CBS Interactive, according to the DomainTools Whois History Tool. The domain name was acquired by CBS as