Domain Name Shame Or Fame

Thanks to Symbolic computers in Massachusetts we are now celebrating the 25th anniversary of dot com

. However back then there were only 25 but now it has risen up to 86 million. Nevertheless getting the coolest or the most sophisticated domain name has become somewhat a competition.

But who can blame them? Access to the internet has now become a fundamental right, resulting in people trying to get use of that right more than ever. Therefore the use of the internet has risen rapidly and the competition between companies have also followed suit.

Companies are fighting each other to have the shortest or the coolest domain name to attract people to their sites. Consequently it has now become a multi-million dollar industry. In the US it accounts for two percent of the economy which is about 300billion pounds. Therefore millions of dollars are paid by companies around the world to acquire the best domain name. In fact the world's most expensive domain name "insure.com" was sold for 16 million pounds in 2009.

The main reason for people paying more and more pounds on domain names is to acquire a short, meaningful, and easy to remember name which is not similar to competitors nor a trade mark protected domain name. Thus it would help immensely in attracting customers towards the site and increase the traffic.

As an alternative many people are now buying expired domain names, due to the facts that they have been used several times before, and there may be some back links, page ranks as well as a good reputation attached to it. Or even the possible chance that the domain name may have been promoted by the previous owner. This then saves time, money and energy for the new user.

Nevertheless some of the big companies like Google are now focusing towards something different, recently it bought the shortest domain name "g.cn" for an undisclosed figure, the reason was to make it easier for the Chinese users to use Google because ".cn'' is China's extension. Except for that there are only very few single letter domain names out there which was established in early 1990s when domain names were scarce, for example PayPal's X.com, Nissan's Z.com and Qwest Q.com. Would it make any difference? I wonder? This is because the letter "G" could represent anything from the Guardian? GMTV? Apart from the word "Google". For the benefit of the Chinese people Google registered g.cn to make it more user friendly for people to find the search engine.

However Joshua Schachter had a more creative aspect when it came to domain names, it sounds more "FUN". In 2003 Mr Schachter (the founder of a social book marking web service) registered his domain name as "del.icio.us" in 2005 the website was taken over by Yahoo and has since claimed over 5.3 million users. The domain name is fun, easy to remember and hard to forget. No doubt many of us would remember the name, at just one glance. It is extremely hard to capture the attention of people due to the vast amount of information available to them; therefore amusement would play a greater part in doing so; because people would give anything for a laugh!!

by: John Edet

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