It’s a good idea to register your child’s name in a domain name if it is available. This advice is given by people within the domain name business and others, including the Wall St. Journal last year.
See if the domain name for your child is still available. Click here to find out: https://t.co/DlkNqFL6sM
— VERISIGN (@VERISIGN) February 10, 2016
After Verisign tweeted the message above, I navigated to a website they operate to help parents register matching domain names for their children, MyFirstDomain.com. On this page, you can enter the full name of a child and Verisign will share the available .com and .net domain names that can be registered. This includes domain names that have the first and last names as well as the first, middle, and last names. The less “common” a name, the more likely there will be matching domain names to hand register.
On this website, I noticed that there was another tool mentioned that allow parents to be to “Find baby names based on available domains.” If you go to MyVeryFirstDomain.com, you can enter your last name and select “boy” or “girl” and a list of available name .com or .net domain names is shown. Out of curiosity, I entered my own last name and I see that AndrewSilver.com, KatherineSilver.com, and DonaldSilver.com are all available to hand register.
I can’t imagine choosing a baby’s name based on domain name availability, but these are neat tools.
It’s interesting that when choosing the popular boy name category with Silver as the last name there are a total of 76 options. 55 are registered in .com for a total of 72%. All .nets are available to be registered.
When I was naming my son, we checked to see if the domain was available or not before we officially named him. I registered his name 2 days before he was born.
What will the internet look like in 15-20 years time? And how relevant will a personalised domain name be?
Could it be a complete waste of time?
“I can’t imagine choosing a baby’s name based on domain name availability”
Guilty as charged. We were going back and forth between two first names for one of my girls. One firstlast.com was in use by a quack “life coach” while the other was available. I pushed a little harder for the available first name.
A few years later with my son we didn’t have a lot of choices (due to wanting to name him after a relative) and I found the firstlast.com had already been taken for 15 years. I just checked and now its for sale – so THANKS for posting this, Elliot!
I think Jimmy Kimmel made the joke of the most popular Girl’s name of 2015, “Sophie”
And the least most popular, “Isis Cosby” 🙂