Psst! Want to Buy a URL? Got $5 Million?

Wish you'd bought furniture.com or weblogs.com or drugstore.com 20 years ago when they were available? You'll have another chance this Thursday at a Manhattan URL auction. Bring your checkbook: URLs like seniors.com and arcade.com are expected to go for more than $5 million.

The invitation-only auction of URLs like BeautifulHookers.com, airplanecrashlawyer.com and others will be held in Manhattan as part of Traffic Domain Conference & Expo at The Grand Hyatt. The cover charge for the auction is $2000, and the majority of the 4,000 names to be sold off have reserves of $5,000 or more.

Moniker Online Services, the broker for names being auctioned at the event, claims to have sold porn.com for $9.5 million earlier this year. Monte Cahn, Moniker CEO, says URLs are a hot a commodity.

Do you own your name?
What about your company and your clients' companies? Did they miss out on URLs they should have bought? A lot of companies don't own the URLs of their own products, or variations thereof, even though they are available. Hell, some companies waited so long to register URLs that they can't even get their company name with a .com suffix, and have had to settle for .net, .biz, or others that aren't customers' first choice.

Still others -- including like Dell, McDonald's, and Ford -- neglected to research the URLs they did buy, and those URLs later came back to embarrass them.

The wrong URL sucks
Dell started their corporate blog, now called Direct2Dell, as Dell One2One, but failed to note that one2one.com is the URL of a porn site. (Dellone2one.com now redirects to direct2dell.com.) The URL of McDonald's bizarre blog about a french fry that they said looked like Abraham Lincoln now leads to a porn site. And because Ford didn't purchase the URL www.fordreallysucks.com they've been involved in litigation over the name.

URLs you need to buy right now!
All of which indicates that corporations, or more likely their agencies, still aren't bothering to search to see who owns URLs they are considering, or ones that someone with less than benign intentions might consider.

Please go check right now and be sure that you own the URL for all variations of your company name, products, publications, and so on. And don't forget to buy them with the word "blog" in the URL!

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Posted by: Marble Guard at March 28, 2008 11:45 PM

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