Greg Sterling has some good insights on brand names and the valuation of domains.  THe most obvious domain isn’t always the best performing domain.  Amazon.com is the Web’s largest shopping not, not Shop.com.  Yet, some bread-and-butter domain names have sold for millions.

brands resonate with users, like Amazon and or Google.  It’s probably hard to get the same resonance from straight-forward domain names.   A good brand name is like a great poem, with multiple levels of meaning.  That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for the straight-forward domain name (such as your newspaper name as URL), but in creating subsidiary businesses, brand is vital to success.