You are asking in a very respectful manner, even to a rather blunt previous comment. Class act. And of course it deserves an answer:
1) I have never met a Bernice in my entire life, and I haven't seen one in my social network contacts or among contacts' friends. That alone suggests that the name isn't much popular.
2) Popularity rank doesn't mean frequency, and a 318th place might not sound so impressive when one checks actual numbers of people named Bernice.
3) A 318th place might be an overestimation, depending on the algorithms used.
4) In agreement with the above, although Bernice reached great popularity during the 1920's, its rank by 1984 had dropped to
#935 for the entire US. More up-to-date (but less exhaustive) sources put it at
#5260 by 2013.
5) Since 1946, frequency of babies named Bernice is lower than 1/1,000 and, since 1979, lower than 1/10,000.
6) Even at a highly overestimated frequency of 600 per million (0.6/1,000), not seen since 1953, total number of Bernices in the US wouldn't reach 200K.
7) Like another member in this thread, I recently took part in auctions where better ranked, statistically more frequent, names (including names that matched friends and contacts), with a dotnet extension that I find superior, were sold in the USD 250-350 range.
8) Dotme extension... Personally I don't like it, and I admit it's a very subjective factor in my previous, unsubstantiated, assessment, but I think that one must give certain value to the subjective opinion of someone that has been domaining profitably for 7 years.
9) Among my poorest investments I have had decent names with unpopular extensions, and dropped them because of a total lack of buyer interest.
But if you really, really, like it, never, ever, desist. I have seen names and extensions with lower perceived value go for hefty sums in the hands of great, enthusiastic, sellers.
