Domain names are the new challenge for brands
Dennis Forbes of Yafla Consulting and Software Development has done a fascinating analysis of the currently registered domain names. For those who aren't familiar with them, domain names are your company's easy-to-remember address on the Internet. We registered the domain name "blackfriarsinc.com" in the year 2000, two years before we started the company, so we have a web site at www.blackfriarsinc.com, and you can send me mail at chowe at blackfriarsinc.com. Domain names today are your Internet brand.
But Dennis makes a wonderful point with his research, which focuses at this point only on the most popular business names, those that end with .com. If you're starting a company today, you need a domain name -- and there aren't many that make much sense left. Most of the English words with a .com suffix were taken five or six years ago. What Dennis notes is that all the three-letter acronyms and 80% of the four-letter ones are gone too. How about people's names? All of the common names from the US census, both first names and family names, are taken.
So that's the challenge for establishing a new brand today. Marketers face a tough choice: register something that isn't a current English word and therefore makes little sense, or buy a domain name from a current owner for your brand (who may or may not want to sell to you). If nothing else, we can see that domain name availability is going to drive a lot of branding decisions in the coming years. But for those who own .com domain names today, they are looking like a good investment vehicle; they will only get more scarce with time.
All we can say is that it is no accident this research comes from yafla.com. Only about 7 percent of the five-letter domains are claimed -- so far.
But Dennis makes a wonderful point with his research, which focuses at this point only on the most popular business names, those that end with .com. If you're starting a company today, you need a domain name -- and there aren't many that make much sense left. Most of the English words with a .com suffix were taken five or six years ago. What Dennis notes is that all the three-letter acronyms and 80% of the four-letter ones are gone too. How about people's names? All of the common names from the US census, both first names and family names, are taken.
So that's the challenge for establishing a new brand today. Marketers face a tough choice: register something that isn't a current English word and therefore makes little sense, or buy a domain name from a current owner for your brand (who may or may not want to sell to you). If nothing else, we can see that domain name availability is going to drive a lot of branding decisions in the coming years. But for those who own .com domain names today, they are looking like a good investment vehicle; they will only get more scarce with time.
All we can say is that it is no accident this research comes from yafla.com. Only about 7 percent of the five-letter domains are claimed -- so far.
Technorati Tags: Internet, Web 2.0, Domain names, Web, Branding, Marketing, Research
