DomainTools Blog

Sanctimonious webmasters, or sheer laziness? I’ve often wondered in sheer amazement at the audacity of the treatment doled out to website visitors. Not (I am hoping) by the company, but by the one or two webmasters who are in charge of the web servers.

For example, if you are a visitor to the FBI website, and you type in http://fbi.gov you would think that the site has been taken down by terrorists. In fact, someone too lazy or self-righteous is insisting that you must type in the www. or they won’t let you in. Yes, http://www.fbi.gov works, while http://fbi.gov earns money for Microsoft in the form of advertising on the Page Not Found error pages. Is the FBI, the only government agency in the dark here? Nope: Hud.gov, ATF.gov, FCC.gov all have the odd 90’s insistence that you put the www. in there. Thankfully, the webmasters over at the CIA, SSA, NSA, FTC and the IRS know what they are doing.

In a bricks and mortar example, this is the equivalent of spending thousands of dollars on advertising to drive people to your store. But you have two entrances - front and side. You could very easily have left the side doors open, but instead, your janitor has boarded it up and allows homeless people dressed as Bill Gates to hang out there handing out flyers for your competitors.

Some server administrators may read this and say that it is not a priority since most people know that you should just add www to a domain name. Maybe in the 90’s you twit.

There are not as many examples of this as there used to be in the business world. So, perhaps we can blame this on Government Bureaucracy? However, there is a very real, and even stranger problem occuring in the business world…

Let’s take the bricks and mortar analogy a step further. Let’s imagine that many of your customers arrive at your store and attempt to open a door to your neighboring building. There’s a doorway there, and every day, thousands of your customers are knocking on that door. Good news - luckily for you, the building was acquired by the CEO in a poker game. Bad news - that damn janitor again has locked the door, boarded it up and is letting a vagrant camp out there yelling “Search MSN - this place is closed!”.

I kid you not. And the bigger the company, the more idiotic the mess. FaceBook has a $15 Billion valuation, they own FaceBooks.com but they have allowed their janitor to keep it closed. An estimated 5,000 people a day visit FaceBooks.com, obviously looking for FaceBook.com’s front door. Doing the math, if it takes 10 seconds for each visitor to hopefully realize their error and persevere on to FaceBook.com, that is 5,000 x 10 seconds x 365 days = 5,069 man hours a year of wasted time.

So, thank you FaceBook. You are pissing away 5000 man hours of your visitors time trying to make it harder for them to get to your front door. Why? I just don’t get it. If you are going to go to the trouble of setting up FaceBook.com to redirect to www.FaceBook.com, why not take an extra 2 minutes and set up FaceBooks.com to do the same?

2 minutes of your employee’s time, to save 5,000 hours per year. That’s a good ROI, good PR and just general common courtesy. In the words of Will Ferrel - ‘Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!’

One of the blogs I love to read is Tim O’Reilly because he covers a lot of technical moving and shaking which is going on. In one of his posts this month Tim talked about Bill O’Reilly and how people confuse Tim with Bill. Both guys have rather large public profiles however Tim runs a technical publishing empire and Bill hosts a TV show on Fox. Tim went on to describe how visitors direct navigate to Tim’s Oreilly.com site and see all the technical material yet they still think that the site has something to do with Bill.

One of Bill’s visitors writes in to Tim:

Is this just a website to make more money for O’Reilly????? How can I get in touch with him? This is very important!!! I am more interested in the news than in buying something. Please contact me.

This goes to show how direct navigation effects everything on the Internet. People instinctively type in where they want to go. This behavior can not be un-learned, typing where you want to go will never fade away. This is a strong indication that investing in generic targeted domains is always a good move. If people want something they will simple type it in. By controlling the domains we control what people see, currently our domain monetization industry makes about a Billion Dollars a year. But if you extend the reach of what you call the Direct Navigation industry you will see that it effect not just domainers but other people that build companies on good intuitive domains. There is a certain boost to the marketing effect of a company that builds a business on a preexisting intuitive brands.

If you want to learn about things to do in San Francisco why not just type in SanFrancisco.com and see what appears. As time goes by all the intuitive brands on the Internet that are simple parking pages will morph into the things that people think they should be. The path of least resistance is a law of nature. All things have to obey it. The majority of hikers take the past of least resistance. Water always flows downhill and Internet Traffic always types in what it believes is the most intuitive brand.

The Chicken and the Egg can be argued for hours at length regarding domain names. Does a site exist because of its name or does a site exist because someone invented the brand. Most sites exist because someone branded them however a lot of developers build sites because the domain demands it. Those domains will themselves into existence.

The successful domainer is the one that hears the call of the domain and allows it to exist. The domain practically does the rest of the work.