The Value of “S”. Singular and Plural Domain Names

When I started registering names in 1994-1995 I always went for the singular since it was more of a brand. Most brands are singular like Apple.com so I registered Banana.com and others with that in mind. Now if I were a toy company, Toys.com is much preferred and you had better be selling toys. Toy.com can be both for selling toys and also to sell one particular thing. Toy.com could be a person, and adult site, or any new invention. Toys.com can not because it is general in its understanding and what you audience would expect. I believe many buyers are looking for a popular brand that is already “bought” in people’s minds that has a trust factor built in.

If I were developing Payment or Payments.com they both offer differing scenarios. Payments.com would limit in the fact that most people would expect a payment system or gateway. Buy, Payment.com can be much more.

You bring up a lot of issues that we deal with everyday even in SEO. I tend to place singular words in our Meta tags because payment is already in a search of the word payments. Payments.com is not in a search for the word payment. Many may not think that matters but we do.

Your post is smack on. I wish I had registered the plural when they were free or of little cost but I never had the thought of protecting the names. I was more content on building what I already had and 15 years later my brother and I are still developing them out. To be honest there is a lot of room for others to create something for the internet so why not let others have a shot.

Payment.com and Payments.com could be two completely different businesses that do not compete. Why just shelve a great name when someone else could use it. If there is no intent to develop a name, then sell it or partner it with someone with some great ideas.

I try not to hold to a hard and fast rule, but when both are available it’s certainly a bonus. There are some plural forms that are the accepted term, in many cases the singular is more frequently searched. In some cases owning an abbreviation (say of Ft. Wayne versus Fort Wayne) is nice protection, too. I think I own three or four variations of St. Petersburg Over 90% of the cases though, I own a single name for the keyword(s) in question.
I rarely value these prime keywords based on their type in traffic though exact match queries plays a big factor. I find it interesting that the exact match queries for payment and payments are both incredibly small, which partially explains why the type ins are fairly low for these two domains, too. If you were valuing just on exact match queries though, onlinepayment.com would be worth 10 times as much as payment.com, so that’s clearly not the only factor either.
The real value in these two domains is in their automatic trust and authority that will assist in converting a visitor to a paying user, in getting merchants to accept payments, in getting marketplaces to buy in… and in that regard I don’t see a 40% difference in price. The trust that either one would have is fairly comparable in my opinion (in this case anyway), so payments.com may be a better deal even with less than half of the searches and with a quarter of the existing visitors… even though I personally like payment.com more if money was not an object. Either way, its hard to go wrong at those prices. Unfortunately I left my quarter mil in my other jacket.

Jamie,

I made most of daycare.com Meta tags over seven years ago. It rated #1 for the search term daycare in Yahoo, MSN and Google. There was no particular reason for repeating daycare 3 times at the start and at the end. It ranks well and I leave it alone. Wish there were logic to it but there is not. ;>