Well, since the internet has only been around to consumers since 1993, there have been less than two dozen opportunities for this to happen, speaking in terms of an NNNN.com being the present year, and naturally, just over two dozen if you add a reasonable few years ahead of this year.
Therefore, little opportunity has existed for a pattern to be noticeable.
I sure think it would be cool to own 2015.com come 2015. And it would certainly command a premium if sold in an earlier year.
There are two questions though...
1. Who could possibly use it?
2. Who could kick ass with it in the allotted 365 days (or 366 days in the cases of leap years such as 2012 and 2016)?
I see a minimal, yet far from nonexistent scope for these two.
What comes to mind at first is a camera company such as Canon or Nikon, asking "capture your 2015. Show us what awesome things you did at 2015.com."
If a company did end up doing this, they would need to acquire the domains for several subsequent years so they can
a) carry on the gimmick
and
b) make sure no other company can copy it
The reality is that NNNN.com's aren't easy to get. Or NNNN keyword combinations in any TLD. I know this because I was shocked to see two NNNN's available in .ca this morning that I had no choice but to buy (they weren't years... they were just street numbers for two condo buildings I would like to have a bit of clout in as a realtor). Every other major TLD, even .info and .biz were taken.
Therefore, for any company to really make use out of this, it would be a significant expenditure to them to get their hands on the necessary names to sustain the strategy.
The benefit is that a year is a thing specific to nobody (everybody lives in the same year, and the vast majority regard the year according to the Gregorian calendar), and there is no language barrier, as 2015 means 2015 in English, French, Russian, Polish, Afrikaans, you name it.
So, to answer your question, I would certainly put it at a higher valuation than a seemingly random sequence of digits such as 3015. But it's one of these names that's just "too generic", and given its time volatility, suffers from a very short timeframe in which it can be used.
I'll tell you one thing. If a big deal is made out of 2014.com, then I guarantee you that will make 2015.com, 2016.com, and many years after that SIGNIFICANTLY more valuable.
