This is strictly my opinion so take it as such. Also consider I only deal in .coms, so I will only speak on that.
Mostly I just want names people search for. Hope that is clear and straight forward. Obvious names like dotcomdollars.com and 4dotcoms.com are you have to build it before people come, but you gather what they might sell/offer.
A big thing for me, lets say used sofas. If my local business sold a great deal of them perhaps I would want the name, but somethings are better off on local sites.
I also like if people are bidding on said search terms. If no one is bidding on the term, it loses a lot of points for me. Not only do people need to search for that term, people that offer that must have an interest on you sending them traffic.
A product you can offer is big as well, but if there are products you can offer, that of course is good as well.
Sure a short name might have good value without the above, it sure helps. Mine (the .com) domain dropped the other day, worth big money, but what do you do with it. And if you look at some of our biggest sites, names werent that good.
I use most of the sites on www.dotcomworth.com daily, and I find a great deal of my names from estibot. And the main reason for that is they show me searched terms. I have gotten so many good domains, that I wouldnt have found from their list.
The number of drops daily is insane, the list is over 100k and thats for the main few TLDS. I dont think we can keep getting more glds or whatever names we come up with, but we dont need 4000 tlds, we dont need all the per .coms we have now as partly because so many suck.
I once thought we would never use all the 4-letter .coms. I am still not along with so many others on this. 4 random bad letters dont have much value IMVHO. I have a vendor in my other job, I still cant remember their name. I’ve been buying from them for 15 years and I still have to look it up. There is another vendor in same industry with a 4-letters, and it does have one bad letter, but its one of their names, their 4 letters is shorthand for their name.
