The best domain valuation theory I ever read, was to imagine if the name you were buying would appeal to the type of brand that is a Super Bowl advertiser. The logic goes that if a company can spend over $1 million on a 3 minute ad, it can spend a million on its industry’s category killer domain.

While Andrew Miller and Mike “Zappy” Zapolin developed and executed this theory to perfection with the purchase and sale of Beer.com, and they were quoted in a great article on the topic (link here), the problem is that most domain investors don’t have $500,000 to $1,000,000 lying around to invest in a Super Bowl type of domain.  As a result, you don’t often hear bloggers today talking about the Super Bowl domains that they bought the other day.

Unless that is, if you are investing in IDNs.  The IDNTools.com droplist this week listed names such as (Radio).com and (Phone).com in widely spoken non-English languages.  When buying IDNs, especially large numbers of drops, the Super Bowl test is alive and well.