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In the Middle East, is it Really All about ME?
Fri, 01/27/2012 - 10:33 — Josh Bourne — PermalinkA few days ago, a client sent me an email asking me to weigh in on what domain names her company should register to correspond with its presence in markets in the Middle East. While she was planning to register the core brand name in the relevant ccTLDs, or country code top-level domains (Brand.ae for the United Arab Emirates, Brand.co.il for Israel, etc.), her distributor in the region had advised her that local Internet users tend not to direct navigate to domains in their ccTLDs. Instead, she said that consumers typically type in the brand name followed by “ME” in .COM. So, the distributor advised, our client should register BrandME.com.
The client asked me if I agreed that this was a common practice, and if other major brands followed this naming convention. To my knowledge, it was much more common for brands to stick with ccTLD domains. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of any big brands that follow the BrandME.com practice my client had described. But it sounded interesting, so I wanted to look into it further.
I decided to take a sample of the biggest brands and see whether or not they used BrandME.com domain names. For a quick reference, I looked at the top 20 brands on Interbrand’s Best Global Brands of 2011 list.
Of those 20, I found that only four owned their BrandME.com domain names: Coca-Cola (Coca-ColaME.com, but not CocaColaME.com or CokeME.com), Google (GoogleME.com), McDonald’s (McDonaldsME.com), and Disney (DisneyME.com). Of those four, only two, McDonald’s and Disney, actually direct those domains to content. McDonaldsME.com redirects to McDonaldsArabia.com; DisneyME.com displays Disney content in English.
Of the other 16, some brands’ BrandME.com domains had been registered by third parties. Most pointed to Pay-Per-Click ads or parked pages. Others did not resolve to content. The rest of the BrandME.com domains were not currently registered.
Because the client is a cosmetics company, I checked about five other cosmetic brands’ BrandME.com domains as well. None resolved to brand content. In fact, none resolved to content at all.
So what did I end up telling the client? Basically, it won’t hurt her to make sure all her bases are covered by registering her BrandME.com domain name. But the standard practice is to stick to registering the brandname in the ccTLDs of the relevant markets. If a company has a presence in Saudi Arabia, in other words, it should go after Brand.com.sa.
Are You Ready for Some Traffic?
Tue, 11/08/2011 - 10:54 — Josh Bourne — Permalink
I missed the Chicago-Philadelphia football game last night, so this morning I went online to check the score. On a whim I decided to type MondayNightFootball.com into my browser bar, thinking that there was a chance it might lead me to what I was looking for.
The domain directed me to a page on ESPN's website. At the top of the page was an error message that said, "The URL you requested does not exist, but you may be interested in the content below." That content below was a list of search results for the query "NFL." Since the domain redirected to an ESPN URL, I checked out the WHOIS records and found out that ESPN does indeed own MondayNightFootball.com – or at least, ABC Sports, Inc. owns the domain, and ABC and ESPN are both owned by the Walt Disney Company.
That made sense to me, given that ESPN has been broadcasting Monday Night Football since 2006. Out of curiosity, I went over to Google and searched "Monday Night Football," The first result? ESPN's Monday Night Football page, located at espn.go.com/nfl/mnf. So if ESPN owns the domain name MondayNightFootball.com, why doesn't it redirect the domain to the section of its website devoted to Monday Night Football?
According to Compete, the domain MondayNightFootball.com gets, on average, roughly 500 unique visitors per month, and peaks at around 1,600 visitors per month during football season. Based on our own research, we have found Compete grossly underestimates traffic to some domains, so this number could actually be higher. But what this means is, with a simple redirect, ESPN could drive, at minumim, an extra 500 to 1,600 people to its Monday Night Football page without having to create any new content at all.
I also checked on MNF.com, the abbreviation that ESPN uses both in its URL and in its television broadcasts. ESPN does not own that domain, which currently points to a pay-per-click site. During the off-season, MNF.com only gets around 200 unique visitors per month, but during the fall, traffic jumps to over 3,000 visitors per month. Many Internet users favor shorter domains (think AE.com for American Eagle Outfitters or UA.com for Under Armour), so it's not surprising that football fans type in MNF.com about twice as much as MondayNightFootball.com during football season.
If ESPN were to acquire MNF.com and redirect both that domain and MondayNightFootball.com to its existing Monday Night Football page, it could boost its traffic by approximately 4,000 monthly visitors (at least) during the NFL season. While this number is tiny compared to the total MNF audience, it represents a boost that ESPN could gain without any extra promotion or content development. The traffic figures also show that these domains are likely to be highly intuitive to a broader audience as well. This dual redirection strategy would allow the sports media leader to build up its MNF brand without losing the folks who prefer to type in MondayNightFootball.com.
And that means Monday Night Football's next big winner could be ESPN itself.
Hot and Bothered
Tue, 08/09/2011 - 09:06 — Samantha Demetriou — Permalink
On September 7, 2011, the Sunrise period for the new .XXX TLD will open with two concurrent rounds. Sunrise A will allow members of the adult industry with verifiable trademarks and domain names in other gTLDs to reserve their names in .XXX, while Sunrise B will give trademark and intellectual property rights holders from outside the adult industry the chance to block their marks from being registered as .XXX domains. So, for example, a brand like Disney will be able to ensure that no one can ever register Disney.XXX (and thereby ensure that my childhood memories remain undefiled).
This week, Easyspace, one of the largest web hosting companies in the UK, reported that hundreds of businesses have rushed to pre-register their trademarks with the company before the Sunrise period opens. According to Easyspace, only about 20 percent of those have been adult companies.
The .XXX policy of allowing trademark owners to completely block a domain name is somewhat revolutionary. These domains will resolve to a generic informational page, meaning trademark owners will not have to face the challenge of what kind of content to point their .XXX domains to. After all, is there really any “right” way to use, say, Hormel.XXX?
It is encouraging to see trademark owners taking advantage of this resource and taking the proper steps to safeguard their brands and marks in this new space.
Could New TLDs Really Catch On?
Fri, 12/03/2010 - 15:00 — Phil Lodico — Permalink
As many of us are preparing our comments on ICANN’s latest new TLD guidebook, many companies are also trying to determine if they will actually apply for a new TLD if they arrive as scheduled by ICANN in May of 2011.
Even though many of the previously launched “new TLDs” did not bring about a meaningful shift in online consumer behavior, there is a shared concern among digital executives over not knowing what will happen with this launch, or what the appropriate action will be.
Imagine if Facebook is one company that applies for a new TLD in the first round. It might make sense; Facebook has had its fair share of username and security issues and Facebook users spend more time on facebook.com than any other site. The possibility of creating .FACEBOOK domains for each user, such as PhilLodico.facebook, might be interesting to Facebook and it would likely be valued by users as well.
Facebook alone has over 500 million users. That would translate to 500 million new domain names; tripling the number of domain names in existence overnight.
Now imagine adding in other Internet powerhouses like Google, Microsoft and Apple, and big brands like Coca-Cola, Disney and others. These companies have enormous reach in terms of customer touch points, not to mention budgets with which – if they wanted to – they could try to shift consumer behavior.
Between Facebook’s grassroots consumer behavior shift and a possible direct marketing program by brand leaders, there is no question; there is a chance that new TLDs will catch on.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could sit on the side and wait and see what other companies do? To see if Facebook does this? To see if 500 million new domain names are registered and to see what consumers begin to do. It would. But ICANN isn’t necessarily going to allow that to happen.
The biggest risk that new TLDs (if approved) present is that we only know that there will be one window that opens. The last time a window opened was seven years ago. What if ICANN gets overwhelmed with this launch? What if it takes years to process the 500 applications that they are talking about possibly receiving? What if ICANN is prevented from moving forward with another window because of
abuse found in the space? What if it is 3, 5, or 7 years until the next window opens?
What happens to the brand owners that decided to wait on the sideline if new TLDs begin to catch on? Those that did apply will have the ultimate competitive advantage while those who didn’t will be sitting on the bench waiting for their chance to play catch up.
While I believe there is still an opportunity to alter if and how new TLDs will be released, this risk of being sidelined is one we all need to take seriously. And as ICANN has shown us, we need to start thinking about this soon.
