DomainTools Blog

I was watching the Simpsons tonight and Ned Flanders rented a room to some college girls so that he could cover his mortgage. It seems his left-handed only store was not doing so well since “Left Mart” came to town. The name of the episode is “Home away from Homer (2005).” The thing that impressed me about the episode is that the domain was pretty good. The college girls were running a website called Sexy Slumber Party.com.

Fox went out of its way to register the domain name and post pictures of the college girls on the website. From what I can tell the website gets a lot of traffic just from that one episode and ever time it plays in reruns. However at some point fox took the website down. We have a cached copy of what the website used to look like but we know that the site is down now and we can’t visit it. FOX, bring back the website!

I have to hand it too Fox for actually getting the domain name. Most shows use fake TLDs for the fake websites, but what they don’t realize is that some day those TLDs will exist and that some day the domain will get traffic. The worst mistake a company can make is announcing a fake website but not register the real domain name. It was smart for them to make the fake website prior to the show going to air. I wish more TV shows did this.

UPDATE: Thanks to our Reverse IP tool I found another fake Simpsons website. This other one was called Dorks Gone Wild.com. I am not sure what episode it was from but perhaps someone will post that in the comments.

Michelle Miller joins Name.com as their new Chief Operating Officer. Bill Muskin is the current CEO of Name.com and has a lot to say about the deal. Michelle was also the former COO of BuyDomains before she helped sell it to NameMedia two years ago for a reported $65+ Million. Michelle was instrumental in building the value at her former company and will be working on a lot of new ideas for Name.com in the future.

Name.com is in an excellent starting point for Michelle to start her work, they have several hundred thousand domains under management and thousands of customers. With the influx of new ideas that she will bring to the company they expect to take the sleepy registrar and turn it around into a juggernaut. Name.com is arguably the second best domain name for our industry right behind Dotster’s Domain.com. The domain Name.com has more intrinsic value because it is so general. If a domain ever gets replaced with another name it will still be called a name. A name will always be called a name no matter if they are selling domain names, URL names, or ID names.

However Name.com is hard to find in Google organically, for the query “Name” they appear 5th. Name.com is a brand that is hard to market because it is so generic. The secret they have is that it is easy to remember and easy to share virally.

Google just introduced a theme picker to their custom homepage. Users can choose one of 6 new themes or stay with the classic view. I decided to pick the bus stop theme because it looked nice. I picked the theme on a sunny day, so I had no idea what I was in for. Little did I know the image would change as the weather did. Because I am a Seattle native, I am constantly under attack from the rain. I look outside and it is cold and depressing. Now my homepage is cold and depressing. Hmmm, Thanks Google!

Wikipedia says, “Seasonal affective disorder is prevalent even in mid-latitude places with mild winters, such as Seattle.” It suggests light therapies as a cure, and I would suggest Google allows people to turn the rain off. I like snow in the winter, falling leafs in the autumn, and new growth in the spring, but rain should have an off switch. That bus stop should have some trees behind it so I can see the seasons changing. How about some flowers in the field too.

Domain Speculators don’t stay in if it is raining - they still go out and register domains. Google Decorative Themes.com was registered the same day Google launched their service by a company called Click Cons of all things. However, Google Theme.com had been taken for months before the service launched by someone else. It looks like Google is getting lazy at protecting their new services and their trademark.

We took a look at all the domains Google owns and we found some interesting things. Domains often predict the future because a company can’t announce something publicly without having the domain name first. So to get the scoop on a Google we started to look at some of the domains they own.

• Oct 2000 - Sergey Brin.com - Defensive Registration of a co-founder but they forgot to get Larry Page.com.
• Oct 2001 - Schoogle.com - Perhaps an alternative name to Google Scholar.
• March 2002 - Fourth-Party.com - Why would Google register this?
• May 2002 - Fire Hunt.com - Looks like Google quietly bought this company.
• June 2002 - Blazing Search.com - Related to Fire Hunt
• July 2002 - Cobra Search.com - Related to Fire Hunt
• Jan 2003 - Charity Visa.com & Charity Debit Card.com - Perhaps Google wants to get into the Credit Card business.
• Feb 2003 - Got Google.com - Marketing department wanted to make bumper stickers or shirts.
• Feb 2004 - Google MasterCard.com - Google wrestled this away from the copycat
• May 2004 - Google Time Warner.com - Just in case they bought Time Warner back in 2004.
• Feb 2005 - Every Classified.com - Google’s alternative name to Google Base.
• June 2005 - Free-Wifi.info - But they don’t own the non-hyphen version or the .COM, bad tip off they want better names.
• April 2006 - Participating Store.com - Two months before Google Checkout launches.
• June 2006 - Bay Area Burritos.com - Maybe a Google local search sample site that never launched.
• Aug 2006 - Image Labeler.com & Google Image Labeler.com - One day before launching they bought the domain.
• Aug 2006 - Bench-Index.com - Secret Benchmark Utility?
• Aug 2006 - Beach Wood Car Care.com - Maybe another future Google local search sample site.
• Sept 2006 - Search Mash.com - Registered twenty days before they silently launched this new search engine.
• Feb 2007 - Guxiang Com.com - A miss-spelling of a chinese portal.

Splenda wants to shortcut any free speech or backlash to their product by registering all the negative domains. It all started back in the 90’s when AOLsucks.com successfully defended its use of the Trademark of “AOL” in its name and established the legal precedent (BTW, AOL bought AOLsucks years later). Courts have found that the sucks appended domain names do not confuse the consumer, and their registrants have a right to voice criticism. To proactively combated this, companies with big brands now find it common to register the domains before critics do. But when reading the list of domains that Johnson & Johnson registered it looks like they predict bad side effects or that their product may be dangerous. Creative names like Splenda Side Effects.com, Splenda Dangers.com, Splenda is not Safe.com, and Victims Of Splenda.com are thought up by the marketing team at Johnson & Johnson. It looks like J&J was late to the game because the more obvious negative domains are owned by critics like sucks and kills. However J&J decided to register the .NET versions instead. The cost of the domains is nothing compared to the legal or PR battles that could take place if a critic successfully uses the domain name. Large companies should make it a proactive practice to register negative domains while they are still in the branding phase of their product.

Johnson & Johnson owns:

Splenda Sucks.net, .org, .biz, .info
Splenda Kills.net, .org, biz .info
Splenda Truth.com , .net, .org, .biz, .info
Splenda Poison.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
The Dangers of Splenda.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
The Facts About Splenda.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
The Splenda Dangers.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
The Splenda Facts.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Victims of Splenda.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
The Truth about Splenda.net, .org, .biz, .info
The Splenda Truth.com, .net, .org, ,biz, .info
Splenda Toxicity.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Splenda Toxicity Center.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Splenda Victims.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Splenda Health.com
Splenda and your Health.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Splenda and your Family.com, .net, .org, .info, .biz
Splenda Myths.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Splenda Alert.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Splenda Facts.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Splenda Safety.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Truth about Splenda.info, .biz
Splenda Side Effects.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
About Splenda.com
All about Splenda.net
Banon Splenda.com
Bitter truth about Splenda.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Facts about Splenda.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Myths about Splenda.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Official Splenda Site.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Splenda Dangers.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Splenda Diabetes.com
Splenda is not Safe.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Splenda is not so Sweet.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info
Splenda Sucralose.com
The Truth about Splenda Safety.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info