Expressing yourself? Protecting yourself? Goofing around with a major brand's trademark? Everything is possible
Jeffrey Rowland is the founder of Topatoco, a company dedicated to selling books, t-shirts, and other merchandise for webcomics artists. He’s also a webcomics artist himself, and — mostly unrelated — a fan of odd domain names. Thus, when the new .horse top-level domain became available, he did the obvious thing: he bought .horse domains for two of the Internet’s most prominent brands, Netflix and Tumblr. tumblr.horse still points to where Rowland put it, his company’s own Tumblr page. Netflix.horse, though, prompted a response. “Netflix found out and followed the laws established to protect trademarks, and demanded I turn it over, and I complied,” said Rowland.
There’s just one snag to the story, though: Netflix hasn’t followed up. In fact, Rowland says, “they still haven’t actually taken possession of it since I initiated a transfer.” Unlike walmart.horse, briefly owned by Rowland’s fellow webcomics artist Jeph Jacques before he got a cease and desist, netflix.horse still points to the page Rowland made: a picture of a horse skeleton with every bone labelled “horse”. I thought it should really redirect to Netflix’s animated comedy Bojack Horseman; Rowland in his correspondence with Netflix legal suggested Beer For My Horses, which is, sadly, not available to stream.
The point of this story — other than its obvious hilarity — is that Netflix apparently felt obliged to make a pro forma effort to keep control of its brand on the oddball .horse domain, but not so obliged that they actually did anything about it. And even though .horse was conceived of as a platform to give “horse owners, service providers, horse industry employees and volunteers the opportunity to clearly define their presence on the Internet and to help potential customers gain access to content about horses,” things don’t necessarily seem to have worked out that way. None of the obvious domains have been set up: no saddle.horse, no bridle.horse, no race.horse, not even rocking.horse. And .horse is just one of a slew of new top-level domain names to hit the Internet in recent months that include .boo, .fly, and .moe. So is anyone actually using these domains? And why would anybody want to?
Small-time dreams
Mike McLaughlin, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Domains at the registrar GoDaddy, says that the typical purchaser of a domain name of any sort of description is a small business — often a very small business, a single person or a couple of friends with an idea and not much else. And they don’t have a lot of money to spend: “You’re never more price sensitive than at that moment of creation,” says McLaughlin. That puts .coms out of reach for many; typically, easy-to-remember .com domains are either already owned by someone or start at tens of thousands of dollars and go up from there. The new top-level domains don’t cost that much, and probably never will. Elisa Cooper, Vice President of Product Marketing for the brand protection company MarkMonitor, laughed when I suggested that pizza.horse might someday go for the princely sum that someone might expect to pay for pizza.com (though maybe the fact that horse doesn’t sound like an appetizing pizza topping lowers the value somewhat).
McLaughlin says that customers gravitate towards what he calls “semantically meaningful” domain names — that is, names that at least sound like words in the customer’s own language. That’s because, even though most Internet users today are as likely to start surfing the Web by typing into a Google search box as they are to actually type out a URL, “word of mouth is still one of the strongest marketing tactics of all time.” If your domain is easy to say, it’s easy to tell people about, or remember when your customer sees it on a billboard or a Valpak ad. Thus, top-level domains that are actual everyday words might have a leg up when it comes to memorability. However, many still need what McLaughlin calls “social proof” — basically, enough use that people recognize them as endings for URLs rather than odd typos — to really take off.
No panacea
Nevertheless, once you do move past word-of-mouth and into the realm of Internet search, a generic top-level domain may not help you as much as you think. Brandon Seymour, an SEO and online marketing consultant, says that “I’ve had several clients approach me about acquiring some of the new TLDs that recently became available. They seem to think that some of the keyword-rich domains, such as .marketing or .lawyer, will help them increase search engine rankings.” They’re working on the same logic that led many people in the early wild-west days of the Internet to grab generic and “partial match” domains, like chicagodentist.net.
But those days are gone, thanks in part to shifts in how Google indexes the Internet. In the wake of the search giant’s 2012 adjustment, dubbed the “exact match domain update,” Google “does not factor in the keywords within a domain, or extension for that matter,” says Seymour. In fact, “Google has actually gone on record saying that all TLDs are treated equally. The newer TLDs have zero ranking benefit.”
Moreover, use of a particularly offbeat top-level domain that you bought on a whim can have a negative impact as you become more professional. Sharon Geltner, a business analyst at the Small Business Development Center at Palm Beach State College, says that “it’s tempting in the gig economy to buy goofy or bizarre or even offensive domains, because so many people are not employed full-time, or at least not making enough money to live on, without moonlighting. The problem is, the off-color company name can leach into their ‘real identity’ and have an adverse impact on their day job and their future. It’s a good idea to stand out, but not like a sore thumb.”
Defensive moves
So maybe you don’t want to grab a .horse or .ooo domain as your company’s main identity. But you still might want to keep them in your back pocket. One reason for this that might not be immediately obvious is infosecurity, says Ryan Barrett, Vice President of Privacy and Security at Intermedia, a cloud IT solution company. “A reason to buy unusual TLDs is to protect against phishing attacks and other scams,” he says. “That’s because one particularly insidious phishing technique is to send emails from domains that are very similar to a legitimate one — for example, ITworld.nyc instead of ITworld.com. After all, it only takes one user to fall for it.”
We don’t know of anybody pretending to be ITworld, but this gimmick has been used in the real world, says Barrett. “On July 14, someone created a fake Bloomberg News story on the domain bloomberg.market that claimed Google was going to buy Twitter — which briefly sent the stock soaring 8 percent before the market figured out it was a scam. Someone very likely made a lot of money from this scam, while many legitimate investors likely lost a fortune.”
When it comes to brand protection, though, MarkMonitor’s Elisa Cooper doesn’t think you need to buy up every possible TLD that matches your main URL or company name. “The number is so great that registering them is cost-prohibitive,” she says, “though if there’s a nexus between your brand and the TLD, you might want to see if it makes sense.”
But one new top-level domain is causing a lot of consternation among Cooper and her colleagues. When I asked her what her least favorite of the new TLDs was, she answered without hesitation: .sucks. The potential use of the domain for criticism of companies is immediately obvious; and, while organizations can reclaim their brand name on most TLDs via the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy if they feel they’re being used in bad faith, someone registering a .sucks domain can defend the move as free speech, Cooper says. Thus, while Netflix could easily reclaim netflix.horse, they might have a harder time forcing someone to hand over netflix.sucks. What’s more, Vox Populi, the owner of the .sucks domain registry, charges $2,500 to trademark holders to secure their URLs — but once the “sunrise period” is over, plans to charge everyone else a mere $10, which many believe smacks of extortion.
A lot of companies do end up buying domains defensively, Cooper says. Pop superstar Taylor Swift bought two new adult TLDs for her name, taylorswift.porn and taylorswift.adult, presumably to prevent anyone else from buying them and putting up the sort of stuff you’d expect. It’s easy to buy up domain names when you’re selling millions of dollars in music, of course. But even her budget isn’t apparently infinite. taylorswift.horse? She didn’t buy it. That’s why it redirects to a random picture of her standing on the back of a horse, a still from her “Blank Space” video. Maybe whoever set that up will get a cease and desist someday. Or maybe it won’t be worth it.
