How to name things… (or how I became “The Most Handsome Man in the World”)
How the rise of AI has helped solve a branding problem too many people are still needlessly worrying about.
Some of you may be wondering if the name of this project, “The Most Handsome Man in the World”, is proof of my giant ego. Others, more attuned to British humour, may be (accurately) detecting it’s a joke; which is only funny because no one who’s seen me could think I was being serious. So why did I choose it, and what can you learn about how to brand things from it?
Naming things has been getting harder for the last century but it started simple. Long ago if you made something you either named your company after yourself, Dailmer-Benz, or what you did, General Electric. Easy.
Over time those obvious names got used and people were forced to try a little harder. However you could still just claim to be the best Acme Whistles, or portmanteau a couple of common words together, International Business Machines. When that got hard people began to get creative, IKEA, but it was the internet which really made naming things feel impossible.
Prior to the web two companies could share a name, as long as the company that had it first couldn’t credibly claim they’d lose business due to confusion. Thus in the US “Dove” means soap sold by Unilever while simultaneously being chocolate sold by Mars. Similarly “Polo” is a shirt (designed for tennis “natch”), a car and a mint, all made by different corporations.
Website names screwed all that up. For years there weren’t a host of non-geographic domain options, and everyone wanted to be a dotcom, which was always easier to say and share than a .co.ck even if you were based in the Cook Islands. People assumed dotcom, and if your site was on another domain you lost traffic to it. So the entire world was forced to compete for the same pool of URLs.
Thus when Uzi Nissan (what a name) bought Nissan.com before the car company did, and decided it would be funnier to fuck them forever (now from the grave) than take whatever seven figure sum they must have thrown at him, that car company was relegated to nissanusa.com, in America, and similarly unwieldy workarounds elsewhere.
“Begun the domain war has.” - Samuel Agboøla
In the nineties, when the web boom exploded, people fought to try and buy up the most obvious and most generic dotcoms for use and resale, often from early movers who made millions from prescient double digit investments.
Brevity was important. Though domains can be up to 63 characters long who wants to type all that?
Prior to the launch of Google in 1999, internet search didn’t work at all (it then worked for a few years and now it doesn’t again). People got around the web by sharing the names of sites directly, or using directories like Yahoo! (ask your Grandma) which simply listed everything they in alphabetical categories you had to trawl through.
Extant search engines were primitive, missing viable error correction, meaning that if you typed in the wrong thing you weren’t going to get where you wanted to. They had no ability to infer from context either. Their sheer crappiness being why directories like Yahoo! were once internet titans.
So if someone told you about a website you’d likely have to type its name into a browser bar. Finding it otherwise being close to impossible unless the spelling was unmessupable. The longer and more complicated the domain name, the less likely anyone would ever get there.
Thus businesses raced to call themselves diapers.com if they sold diapers and soap.com if they sold soap. It was the only way they could reliably be found. Then, just to be sure, anyone with money and sense bought every relevant associated name they could think of as a precautionary measure. If you ran Danni.com, you’d buy the .net, .org and every Danny, Dani and Dan-e variant you could.
Suddenly the soap company and the chocolate bar both wanted Dove.com (soap won).
As this new landscape became understood, people launching things had to find a name that hadn’t been used by anyone, anywhere on earth, in order to secure their spot online. The need to keep names short, and thus easy to spell, meant companies without the funds to buy a real word from its prior owner, or a domain name squatter began looking for hacks. Thus we got compact nonsense via deliberate misspellings and the great dsmvlng whn ppl strtd t wrt lk ths. We’d visit Lycos to buy Flooz we could spend on eBay. Real words became digital gold and remain so, OpenAI spent at least $16M (and likely vastly more) on chat.com as recently as 2025.
Now in the 21st century social media has put individuals in competition with conglomerates. With a continually growing number of places to curate an online presence each platform is a battlefield, where fights to own the same, sensical, identity across multiple spaces has become increasingly internecine.
Unlike the web, overseen by a non governmental[1] public-benefit nonprofit corporation ICAAN, social media platforms are not encumbered by rules or ethics. Some reserve names for the companies most associated with them, even if those organisations have made no move to secure them themselves. Others reallocate names due to lack of activity, on request, or due to public outcry. Their billionaire owners rule by fiat, guided by a single principle–“Do what though whilst shall be the whole of the law.”
The low-stakes crime of using social engineering to separate “OG” names from their owners, has made a lot of teenagers rich, and ensured that if you do get a great name you must fight to keep it. There is little logic behind the way names are chosen, and for all except a well-funded minority, availability trumps coherence or application.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
When I consult with people trying to set themselves up they still play be these old rules. Thinking they need to find, or buy, a short universally applicable name, contorting themselves trying to magic-up something reasonable from the algebraic nonsense that’s still unclaimed. Or they give up, and use different names in different places suffering all the confusion and loss that brings.
What’s changed is that people haven’t needed to type things into a browser in two decades. Systems have got really good at guessing what we mean, as a result of their overarching desire to track us and sell our data. You can find a song by typing in a lyric. You can view @emrata’s Instagram despite not knowing how to spell Ratajkowski. I just typed “Blurred lines model” into their app and she was the 5th result listed.
People find new things almost entirely based on vibes now. In the same way we no longer memorise anyone’s phone number (if you[‘re under 30, yes, we really did that) most of us can’t even accurately tell you the URLs of the sites we visit. Although we imagine we’re at a domain with the same name as the site in our browser, behind the scenes search tools and site owners funnel us to whichever domain they think—usually correctly—that we actually want. They are wrong so infrequently most of us don’t realise any redirection is happening and modern browsers don’t even show us the URL we’re on.
That means that the full 63 character space of web domains, and more or less than that on different social media networks, has now opened up. It doesn’t matter if people can’t spell something, or even remember it properly. Between Duck Duck Go, Google, ChatGPT and Deepseek they’ll find you.
In 2004 when I saw that “The most handsome man in the world” wasn’t registered, told people I was going to buy it because I’d been invited to apply by a government body, and people laughed, I bought it. None of the words were hard to spell, it stuck in people’s minds and it amused me. I didn’t worry that people might make a mistake typing it in–there was no website–I just used it to host a novelty email address.
At the time I was still doing a lot of web design and consulting work, so I had it printed on business cards which I’d deploy as an icebreaker when meeting new people.
Then two years later, in 2006, Dos Equis introduced consumers to “the Most Interesting Man in the World”, and people started to assume I’d copied them.
Those who know say it’s one of the best ad campaigns ever run. I agree. Selling an image of cool to men which has nothing to do with their looks, wealth or fighting ability is both rare and brilliant. Beer is cheap and by drinking Dos Equis, they told us, we too could be exciting, impressive and intriguing.
It’s clever. When an ad tells you a product is associated with being handsome or smart you know, immediately, if those words will ever honestly apply to you. When they don’t a barrier goes up and you recognise the message in the ad as a lie. You’re being glazed. Dos Equis instead told us their beer would make us interesting. A claim that places no demands on our genes or education, and is purely subjective. Even better most of us believe we are to begin with, and that our specialness is simply underappreciated. They flattered us with something every viewer thought was already true about themselves. The message wasn’t felt to be “Drink this and become interesting”, but “Drink this because it’s what interesting dudes like you drink”.
Dos Equis’ sales shot up, and the tagline remains a meme years after the campaign was ended.
I can’t claim they copied my idea of course, and they probably didn’t, but I can say that I told my joke, and shared my business card, in a lot of rooms, in front of a lot of people, who worked with a lot of people in the ad business.
Anyone who runs a Whois search on my URL can see I bought the name before they did, and their campaign validates the logic of my thoughts on branding.
Shorter is better but the penalty for longer is smaller, and less encumbering, than it’s ever been. No one ever says “The Most Interesting Man in the World” is too long to remember, or that it confuses anyone. Exploiting length means you can name things in ways that are relevant to what you’re doing without compromise. Names that actually mean things are once again possible.
(N.B. The only mistake Dos Equis made with that campaign is that they were too dumb to keep it running and have left it to rot. Great ads don’t wear out. Frances Gerety came up with “A Diamond is Forever.” for De Beers in 1947. You’re not going to write a better tagline for selling almost worthless rocks. Ever. Anyone who suggested changing it should be booted into the Sun).
At this point some of you are thinking, if search engines have solved the name problem, why should I care what I’m called on socials, or bother with a domain at all? Won’t they be able to find me even if my name changes with each platform.
Yes, but the internet is now old enough to have proven it’s no different from any other media. You need a brand and you will not want to be tied to Instagram or Snapchat in future anymore than you would MySpace or Napster today. Falling out of fashion is inevitable, unavoidable and universal. The massive investment you make in building an identity should be mobile, not the artefact of a compromise you made to satisfy a platform.
So either you have no real name, and are making it up as you go, or you do in one place and in every other place you’re compromised. If each time you land somewhere new you have to inform people of a new identity you are baking inefficiency into your future and making taking your audience with you needlessly difficult. If your name is different in every venue what is your name anyway?
Some other people will now be thinking, why is this old man talking about websites.
Websites aren’t as sexy as they once were but remain unique. You can own a website as completely as anything which doesn’t have earthly form, you don’t need to rely on any proprietary systems to create one, and anyone with a browser can reach you.
You do not own your socials.
A website can be as simple as a static page with a single link on it, or a fully formed app. Your longest lived digital identity, email, can be run through it, and you can give all the work of managing the back end to Google, Proton or whomever you trust, keeping a single address forever, moving the infrastructure supporting it as you choose. Most importantly a URL can’t be taken away from you on a whim (this may age poorly), and you can link it to anything you want to.
Understanding this has given rise to the POSSE movement, which stands for "Post (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere" or “Post Once (on own) Site, Syndicate Everywhere” depending on whom you ask. It’s smart stuff, exemplified by people like Cory “Enshitification” Doctorow and Molly “Web 3 is going just great” White, both of whom know what they’re doing.
The idea is to make yourself immune to the vagaries of social media by owning your own stuff. That doesn’t mean people have to visit your website. It means they can and, on the day you decide you don’t want to use a platform, or it disappears, all your content remains online under your control.
The practice is simple. Buy a domain, optionally slap a content management system[2] on it to make updates easy, post all your stuff there, and link to your socials. Everything lives on a site you own, and you are “syndicating” it to the platforms you choose for visibility. All your energies go toward your brand, and none are wasted supporting platforms you don’t own.
It’s the difference between directing people to your Onlyfans or Patreon, and telling people they can find links to your Onlyfans or Patreon at your website.
Thus your content and promotions never break over time, you don’t have to constantly try and make people remember the various permutations of your name, and you can add and remove platforms whenever you want without consequence.
You also become cancellation proof, as some oligarch cannot shut down your site anything like as easily as they can boot you from a proprietary platform.
Best yet, for all the reasons discussed earlier, your web domain doesn’t need to be short or easy to spell. You’ll promote it by sending links people will tap, not type, and it will be shared that way too. If people can’t remember the whole thing, or spelling, it doesn’t matter. Every modern search tool, fed a few bits of your comprehensible brand, will understand what’s wanted and point people in your direction. Each time this happens, and someone clicks a link, your brand and its connection to your socials, is further embedded into their memory, and finding you gets a little bit easier for everyone else.
This approach flips the power dynamics of being online on their head. Now the billions invested in servers and software by ad platforms (social media sites) are working for you and not being used to cage you in. With every link and tap your brand is strengthened via the same system of increasing returns which ensures a persons Wikipedia page is almost always their top result, you just don’t need to be notable enough for Wikipedia to access it.
Moreover, without needing a perfect version of your identity on every platform you can be more creative, keep things cleaner and move faster. No more adding four digits to a name and then trying to convince people you’re not a bot. No worrying about what you’re called when you race to sign up for the next big platform. Everyone gets to you through your website, and you promote that everywhere.
The total investment necessary to set up a site is under $20. Wordpress and Ghost are free, and domains are cheap. It’s the single best branding move you can make and the simplicity of having a custom email on a domain that never changes, ever, has real monetary value. Don’t be that uncle telling people to write to them @defuncttelco.com or, even more embarrassingly, @yahoo.
Make the conglomerates work for you. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
ICAAN ceased being under direct US governmental control, in 2016. ↩︎
The most obvious choices for content management in 2026 are Wordpress and Ghost. Both being free to use and open source while offering cheap hosted options. Wordpress has got a lot of well deserved bad publicity recently and is out of favour among the cognoscenti. The power of WordPress is 20 years of history, stability and flexibility. It’s a core piece of web technology and will likely be around in 20 years time. If you want to vibe-code your way around it every LLM has been trained on thousands of pages of information and understands it. I built my web consulting career on Wordpress. It’s made me money. Ghost is what runs themosthandsomemanintheworld.com. It’s new, it’s modern and it is built to make running newsletters easy. Much less widely supported than Wordpress, mainly to its age, it feels a lot like what Wordpress would be if written today. Just as the realisation that you don’t need many features in a word processor frees you from Microsoft Word and Google (Writer? I’ve never voluntarily used it[3]…Docs!), simplicity in a content management system isn’t a bad thing. Of course you can roll your own CMS if you want, have the time, and like learning about, and managing, security exploits in realtime. Plenty of people do. I will never be one of them. ↩︎
The idea that I would choose to hand the world’s largest advertising company access to everything I write, giving them and whomever they choose to share it with or sell it to, unfettered access to my thoughts, secrets, mistakes and musings is utterly insane. I have also never once thought “Writing this would be easier if some asshole other than me was making notes in the comments and arguing about split-infinitives”. I bite my thumb at Google Docs. ↩︎