www said:
Short and sweet is certainly generally desirable, but it's by no means a rule. Many relatively "long" domains are worth just as big a fortune as many or most of the best shorter ones, and many "long" are worth much more than many "short." For instance, the appraisal boards see a lot of relatively short names, but not many of them come within a hundred miles of names like
ForSaleByOwner.com (reportedly bought for $835k) or CaliforniaRealEstate.com (three words, twenty letters, and quite a few syllables - I'm confident most of us would sure be glad to have it). So, I would be very careful about thinking one of your long names is worth less than it really is.
good points of observation!
short domains, particularly 3 letters will always command a ceratin value.
terms, that people type in browsers to finds info or products, will always command a certain value.
no matter what the length is!
the appraisal via a "machine" would always pick the 3 letter domain over the "term", if it is longer than three characters.
thus making that appraisal biased.
for branding a name, it depends on your biz model.
the best are one word domains and one word names that were "made-up" (like yahoo) followed by "two word" domains.