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Yes. I spent tens of thousands of dollars to purchase FreeDrive.com. It was a web 1.0 company back in 1997 that raised $20 million dollars and went bust.

I'm building the web 2.0 version of this company now and I am starting with a memorable domain that has over 200,000 backlinks already built-in.

If you are a web business, your domain name is your most important asset.

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Wholeheartedly disagree. You can turn a worthless domain into a valuable one.

Can you really count on people manually typing in familiar urls today? Even organic search results are not as crucial as they once were.

Somewhere down the line you're going to sink many $K into marketing, I don't see why paying for a domain name that already has some traffic and name recognition is a categorically bad idea.

Was it a bad deal for 'freedrive.com'? Depends on the specifics of the situation and how the company leverages their name recognition.

Depends on a lot of factors, but your pagerank can be a huge deal for many sites still. People deep searching into your content, when they didn't even know they were looking for you, is huge ... if that applies to you anyway.

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