We commented before on the crowdsourcing website Namethis.com, where $99 gets you a new name for your product, company or service. As we predicted, it has not gotten any better. The names generated are painfully bad, as evidenced by recent "winners" including:
Kareero.com - Career Oriented Website /Personal Branding (sounds like a human resources magician to us)
Sheppard Systems - Online Church Communications Tool (why not spell it Shepherd?)
Givolution - Gift Card Website
www.know-a-pro.com - Website for connecting people with services
fAIRhenheit - new technology for central heating and air conditioning systems (misspelling and case sensitive weirdness included at one low price!)
EcoCool - First Stage of an Air Conditioner Motor
Frescomfort -Second Stage of an Air Conditioner Motor (thank God it stops here and there is not a third or fourth stage)
Health eJourney - medical tourism website (an "e" name"? Helloooooo 1990's!)
Manĝaĵo - 100% Organic Fast Casual Californian Restaurant (this one is a classic..... it's Esperanto......Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?)
We also noticed...
- The same peple are "winning" over and over which implies that the "crowd" is more like a small informal gathering.
- The crowd is getting asking questions and not getting answers
- The economics don't add up. The company keeps $36 of the $99 it charges for a naming job and they are not breaking any volume records. Case in point. As of today, they have two, count 'em two, naming jobs in the queue. The investors who ponied up $3,000,000 for the parent company probably want a little more bang for their $3,000,000 bucks.
Namethis.com is the poser-child for you get what you pay for...in this case, namedreck, and is proof that crowdsourcing in many cases sounds better than it actually is in practice. NameThis, we are putting you in the deadpool.
For names that don't suck at any price, we recommend that you use a professional.
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