Think Pizza Hut and their recent rebranding efforts.

Which would you rather own ?

SearchEngine.com or Google.com

Books.com or Amazon.com ?

Burger King or McDonalds ?

It’s all about getting someone to remember your site. Because if it’s something Generic like CoolGames.com , a normal consumer may forget the site and type in NiceGames.com , probably another games site. Brandable sites like the ones listed above really stick in your mind and can’t get confused.

Also, when trying to buy a domain like CoolGames.com , it is probably a lot harder than buying something like Umandu.com . (Random Word I made up.) They both can serve the same site with different price tags on each.

If your a domainer, you can probably hoard a Generic domain longer and make a ton more money than a Brandable one.

Just a sample.

Recently we renamed ClassyDomains.com to Mocus.com

Reason:
Classy domains describes fairly the site content but it’s a term that has a low popularity. Almost nobody search “classy domains” so the type-in was null, a good seo on the term will not bring any significant traffic. It’s also difficult to remember as it’s not the common way people call this type of domain names.
Probably if we had succeeded to acquire CatchyDomains.com we will have keep the name.

In the other name Mocus.com is a short readable that has his own personality, so it’s better to design ad creatives for advertise the site.

We own PremiumDomains.com, keep the name for the current site has sense, idem for domaining.com.

My feeling is it only has sense to keep the generic when it’s the killer term for the vertical.