Nissan Vs. Nissan

– Follow Alan Dunn on Twitter

Owning the right domain name is a critical part of branding. Public companies like Facebook, Endurance and Twitter have all acquired better versions of their original domain name. A reverse WHOIS search will even show celebrities like Mark Cuban have invested in key domain names such as Matter.com, Practice.com and Replace.com (presumably for future projects).

The acquisition of great domains is not a small business anymore. Weekly sales are in the millions of dollars. Brand purchases have their own column at DomainNameWire, and the attention from China has catapulted many domain name values to all-time highs.

But what happens when you really want a domain name and don’t want to pay the price and/or can’t agree to a deal?

Nothing good.

Just ask Nissan Motor Corporation.

I think it’s fair to say most American consumers automatically think Nissan Motors is located at Nissan.com. After all, Nissan has spent hundreds of millions — possibly billions — promoting the brand “Nissan” around the world.

But if you think that, you would be wrong.

Nissan owns the domain name NissanUSA.com.

A man named Mr. Uzi Nissan, who owns a computer company called Nissan Computer, actually owns the domain name Nissan.com.

For trademark experts, intellectual property attorneys, domain name owners and well… anyone who likes a David vs. Goliath story, this is one to bookmark.

The story has everything you want to read. A man registered his family last name (Nissan.com) in 1994, for a company he started in 1980, when Nissan Motors was known as “DATSUN.” Years later, he is sued by the Nissan Motor Corporation, starting what would become almost two decades of legal arguments and maneuvers, even entering a request to the United States Supreme Court.

The opening brief of 97 pages is worthy of a novel.

And David (Mr. Nissan) is winning … so far. It doesn’t look like Nissan Motors is any closer to obtaining the domain name today than it was 20 years ago.

Mr. Nissan’s last update shows that Nissan Motor Company (after a decade of lawsuits) applied for a trademark for the term Nissan under the category, “Computer software games; computer storage devices, namely, flash drives.”

USPTO records show the trademark application was filed on March 27, 2007, and then finally registered and live six years later, on April 23, 2013.

Remember, Mr. Nissan has a computer company so we may see another chapter in this saga soon.

Why is this case important?

For domain name owners, this is a case your attorney should read before responding to any purchase request from a company with a similar name.

For business owners and marketing professionals, however, this is much more important. This case of Nissan (Motor Co., LTD.) vs. Nissan (Computer Corporation) is a visual example of the possible struggles from not choosing the right company name, not obtaining the right domain name, and/or not valuing the acquisition of a key domain name the same as a key piece of real estate.

Paul Graham, a well-known VC and co-founder of the Y Combinator seed capital firm, published a post in 2015 called, “Change Your Name.” The article starts by saying “If you have a US startup called X and you don’t have x.com, you should probably change your name.” Paul goes on to explain, “The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness.”

Weakness is only one aspect. Not having the best version of your domain name also causes brand confusion, exposes you to potentially embarrassing content (ask Jeb Bush), and very real security issues with people emailing the wrong address.

Unlike global companies like Volkswagen, BMW and Fedex.com, where consumers can type in VW.com, BMW.com or Fedex.com and choose their country of choice, Nissan Motors offers a more complicated user experience where one has to visit country code sites to see local information (such as Nissan.ca or Nissan.co.uk).

In fact, on Page 26 of the opening brief, it reads:

Nissan Motor’s Internet Strategy Manager, Merril Davis, puts it in a firm-wide memorandum distributed in 1999, ‘our current proliferation of regional websites and URL’s creates confusion for customers and fragments [the] Nissan and Infiniti brands.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Furthermore the corporate website for the Nissan Motor Corporation is located at Nissan-Global.com, which doesn’t show up on the first page of Google when you search for Nissan. The company even owns NissanGlobal.com (without the hyphen) and doesn’t forward the name to Nissan-Global.com. Obviously, Goliath has some issues in understanding how domain names work.

Nissan Motor Co. also operates ChooseNissan.com, NissanFinance.com, NissanNews.com, NissanOnetoOneRewards.com and likely others.

We could also mention the thousands of people likely emailing [email protected] by accident every month, probably even Nissan employees, but that would be too painful.

The Takeaway

No matter how big your company is, it’s not always possible to get the domain name you want.

Nissan is a victim of its own success in many ways, as well as bad timing.

Choosing a short name makes branding easier, and 20 years ago the Internet wasn’t nearly as popular. For perspective, it wasn’t until another year after Mr. Nissan’s registration of Nissan.com (in 1995) that Joshua Quittner wrote the legendary “Billions Registered” article for WIRED Magazine, where he called McDonalds only to fail and find anybody interested in registering McDonalds.com — so he did.

New companies can learn from this by paying attention to naming at the time of launch and making sure their domain name is available. Once you start building a brand, it may be very expensive or impossible to change course.

On a positive note, Tesla Motors finally acquired Tesla.com.

Awesome, I really don’t want to email [email protected].

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– Follow Alan Dunn on Twitter

As we move more into a digital world brands are often faced with naming and branding questions. For new companies it’s about choosing the right name to convey their message. For more established companies the idea of re-branding becomes a possibility. Whatever the stage, it’s important to get naming right.

A couple months ago ProsperWorks re-branded to Copper and acquired the Copper.com domain name in a private transaction. By almost all measures, this was one of the great re-brands of the year. Jon Lee, Copper’s CEO/Founder, wrote why it was important to change to a non-traditional name:

“… the fact that our software is used by marketing, sales, service, support, and even product teams… well, that meant no more “sales____” this or “pipe____.” And yes, we made a clear decision to not have “____CRM” as our name. We wanted a name that was relatable, memorable, fun, and instantly recognizable the world over.”

Re-branding moments are supposed to go like this. They are supposed to elevate the brand, heighten employee enthusiasm and show long term dedication to consumers.

However, not all re-branding stories are the same.

The story of SEVA.com is one of those other stories.

The founders of ConvertKit presumably fell in love with this name for a re-brand, so much they paid $310,000 USD for the SEVA.com domain name back in July.

On the surface, this word seems perfect for many companies. After all, who wouldn’t want a great 4 letter pronounceable word as a brand. Furthermore, by definition the word SEVA means “selfless service: work performed without any thought of reward or repayment”.

Almost a perfect name for a company whose values include Teach everything you know, Create every day, Default in generosity and more.

However, it was not meant to be.

While by definition SEVA seemed to be a great fit it was the community reaction which caused a shift in re-branding. A shift so important that the founders of Convert Kit should be recognized for what they did.

Less than 8 weeks after spending $310,000 to acquire the domain name the re-branding to SEVA was shelved and Nathan Barry, the company’s Founder and CEO, explained why it was necessary to recognize the importance of this word to various cultures and religions and not commercialize the word.

Nathan’s entire letter is here.

These are words any founder, any agency .. any person should read.

Not only did it take guts to incur the financial loss but also a sense of humanity (and humility) to accept what was unknown prior to the acquisition and make the decision not to change.

Words are powerful. Commercializing words is more powerful.

Most words don’t have such deep meaning as SEVA however imagine if Hanukkah.com was a tabloid, Christian.com was a vice magazine or Shalom.com was a crypto company. The very moment a word enters mainstream as a brand it can often weaken the word, lead to a loss of meaning and hurt people never meant to be hurt.

This moral sense. This type of humanity. This public display of humility.

This is what we need more of today.

In a world where money rules, decisions like this keep things sacred.

Well done Mr. Barry.

Well done indeed.

Great brands are more than just words. Great brand names evoke emotion, inspire engagement and provoke discussion. The greatest brands, however, are those that tell a story. Gemini.com is one of those great brands.

The Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, founded the Gemini Trust Company in 2012 as part of their journey and commitment to the future of Bitcoin. This commitment includes the pursuit of an ETF named the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust and a Bitcoin price index called WinkDex.

Both brothers have continued to be passionate about this sector of the cryptocurrency space, and Gemini Trust Company was launched in 2015 alongside a banking relationship with a New York State charted bank. This relationship was not only one of the cryptocurrency industry’s first key moves closer to Wall Street recognition, but also provided individual and institutional investors with the protections of FDIC insurance.

However, there are a few stories here. We already know the story of the Winklevoss twins and Mark Zuckerberg. We also know that the Winklevosses have been a driving force behind Bitcoin in an industry that (like all new technology) depends on such recognizable support to launch.

The brand story behind it all, though, is the reason they choose Gemini as their company’s name.

In 2015, the Winklevoss brothers also acquired the domain name Gemini.com for an undisclosed sum. While the NDA may tell a story of a high-priced domain name sale, the real value lays in what the brand name says to them.

According to a 2015 blog post by Cameron Winklevoss:

“So, why the name ‘Gemini’? After white-boarding a list of possible names for several weeks, we settled on Gemini for a host of reasons. Gemini is the Latin word for ‘twins’ and as such, it inherently explores the concept of duality. We were drawn to this both because of the two worlds of money (old and new) that will intersect on the Gemini platform as well as the two-way nature of trade that it will facilitate. But that’s not all. Once we picked our name, a fun fact emerged. We realized that NASA’s Project Gemini was a spaceflight program focused on laying the groundwork for Apollo’s later mission to land man on the Moon. As such, it was coined (no pun intended) man’s ‘bridge to the moon’. In this spirit, we’ve built Gemini to be ‘your bridge to the future of money’. Oh, and Tyler and I just happen to be identical twin brothers.”

Branding is so much more than a catchy name. The Winklevoss twins have an engaging story to tell about their company until the end of time. One of interest. One that inspires. And one that discounts their fame and elevates their branding knowledge.

Can you do that with your brand?

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, announced on May 12 they were the successful winner of the auction for the new top-level domain name extension .blog.

The winning bidder was a company called Knock Knock Whois There LLC, but it wasn’t until now that the true owners of this LLC were announced.

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, published a post explaining the need for privacy. “We wanted to stay stealth while in the bidding process and afterward in order not to draw too much attention, but nonetheless the cost of the .blog auction got up there.”

Automattic has now joined the list of brands who have invested millions of dollars into owning new domain name extensions. Google paid $25 million for the .app extension last year, and Amazon acquired .buy for $5 million.

According to ntldstats.com, total new top-level domain (NTLD) registrations have now surpassed 17 million. While this number sounds impressive, it’s the adoption of these new domain names by companies and publishers that really matter. WordPress has the X factor here. It’s massive, relevant customer base is almost second to none. VentureBeat has reported that WordPress now powers 25% of the web, which may just be the perfect match for seeing adoption of new domain name extensions scale.

Personal Branding

It’s well known that most all the best dot-coms are taken. So, for personal brands, the cost of acquiring the perfect dot-com is often far greater than the typical person can afford. However, it’s not just a dot-com-world anymore.

Take, for example, Ryan Anderson Bell, founder of streaming conference site Summit.live, and a nominee for Periscoper of the Year. Ryan has collected almost 4 million likes on Periscope and is followed by over 17,000 people. We asked Ryan why he chose Ryan.live.

“Dot-com simply doesn’t mean anything,” said Ryan. “And, who wants to say Twitter dot com slash Ryan underscore A underscore Bell?” – (Ryan’s actual Twitter handle).

Ryan may be on to something. New domain name extensions like .live or .blog intuitively tell people what to expect before they arrive.

And it’s not just tech founders like Ryan seeing the advantages of these personalized domains. Gene Marks, president of the Marks Group, published an article on how professional athletes are adopting the new domains, including D.J. Fluker of the San Diego Chargers, pro golfer Lee Westwood, DeMarre Carroll of the Toronto Raptors, and more.

Even large celebrities like Joe Rogan (of Fear Factor / UFC / NewsRadio fame), who has 650,000 YouTube subscribers and 1.8 million Twitter followers, have embraced the new domains. Joe adopted JoeRogan.live, and is promoting his asset every day, not the vanity URL owned by YouTube. Sure, he still has the community at YouTube, but since he’s telling everybody HE is JoeRogan.live, then he controls much more of the brand messaging.

Will .blog change the world?

No. But it is another opportunity to acquire a premium piece of the Internet for your personal brand, instead of saying follow me at “Twitter dot com slash Ryan underscore A underscore Bell”.

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– Follow Alan Dunn on Twitter

A Case Study in Human Nature

“The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness.”

This is not a quote by a domain name broker.

This is a quote by one of Silicon Valley’s leading Venture Capitalists. In August 2015, Paul Graham, co-founder of the Y Combinator seed capital firm, penned an article titled, “Change Your Name.”

He goes on to say, “Unless you’re so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you’re a marginal company.”

Again, these are not words of a domain name broker. These are words coming from somebody who has invested millions of dollars in companies and certainly understands a thing or two about branding.

With that said, there are always two sides of a fence and some may debate that a great domain doesn’t always matter. We obviously would disagree with this side, but deciding whether or not to acquire a domain name should never be about the sales pitch, automated valuation tools or comparable sales. Your decision should be directly correlated to the value proposition a great domain name holds to the value of your business.

Does Amazon need to own every specific product domain name, such as babybeds.com or weddingrings.com?

Of course not.

In fact, some would argue this type of domain is only valuable to a brand for: (a) a redirect, (b) brand protection, and/or (c) a defensive play.

Why?

Because Amazon is the brand, and the danger of diluting that brand by focusing on keyword domains is very real. It also costs a lot more to manage a sea of smaller brands, has possible negative workplace culture effects not having all employees working for the same brand and more.

Buying a Better Domain

Let’s look at the more-common scenario of why companies buy domains. Many acquisitions today are not the result of a name change, but of companies acquiring a better version of their domain. Almost any brand expert will tell you that consistency is the key to branding.

Target is Target.

Target cannot be Target in one place, Target Inc. in another, Target Stores somewhere else, Target LLC back at headquarters and TargetCompany.com on the web.

They have to be known as Target to get the most bang for their marketing bucks, both internally and externally.

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Any marketing professional, domain name broker, brand protection company — anyone interested in selling you something — can provide 1,000 reasons why you should make a purchase.

Only you can determine how much a domain name is worth to you.

However, the value is not always in what is gained — it is sometimes also in what is lost.

So we used data to analyze one of the core intangible elements of a domain names’ value proposition. The Human Nature of emails.

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The Project

A couple of months ago, we were asked our thoughts on a very generic domain name— we loved it. Not only is it a pretty cool ancestry term, but it’s also a popular last name (even our industry has a well-known person with the last name), and there are plenty of companies who could potentially benefit from the acquisition of this domain name. Samples include:

• A Public Company
• A Restaurant Franchise
• An Online Catalog
• A Furniture Store
• Many Architectural Firms
• And more.

For privacy reasons, and on the advice of counsel, we cannot mention the domain name. However, this domain is generic enough that anyone who owned it would clearly defend its generic status. It’s a word we all use.

And this is just the beginning. According to Ancestry.com, there are over 200,000 births, marriages, and deaths of people with this word as a surname. Some of the more famous people include an NFL quarterback.

There are potentially thousands of possible buyers for it across the world.

While the owner was interested in selling the domain, he also understood that selling a great domain name at a fair market price is not always an overnight process. In case the domain did not sell, he started to explore some development ideas of his own. What he didn’t realize was what would happen when a catch-all email address was turned on.

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The Catch-All Experience

A catch-all email address can serve many different purposes.

The most popular being an option for the owner to create all kinds of email addresses such as [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc., without having to create individual email accounts. This provides instant flexibility to create any address for specific reasons. For example, if the owner sets up a Netflix account, they could use [email protected] and the “catch all” feature would automatically deliver that email to their preferred address.

However, the Left Side of the @ also provides much more fun for great domain name owners. Human nature often leads to the misspelling of a name or two at times, but we also live in a world where shorter is better. Our brains are wired to automatically remove some words when thinking of brands, such as Inc., LLC, etc., and for some companies this can pose a pretty serious problem when it comes to email.

• Imagine if Google’s website was GoogleInc.com. How many people would type in Google.com?
• How many employees would send internal email to [email protected]?
• How many people email [email protected] every day with confidential state secrets?
• How many job applications for the NSA are sent to the Neptune Shipping Agency monthly?
• How many people try to order a moving van from Atlas.com?
• How many employees give out the wrong email to customers every day?

These are just some of the question types many people wonder so we looked at emails from this domain over a 30-day period.

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What We Found

Wow. Our theory on human nature wasn’t far off.

In the last 30 days, the owner had no idea what was about to happen once the email was turned on. He received a total of 261 emails from unrelated addresses relating to his development. Many of these were spam emails, marketing emails or Russian lady friend requests. But there were also emails from employees, contractors, attorneys, job applicants and friends of people at companies that have “Example” in their domain name.

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For clarification, anytime we use “Example,” we are referring to a user emailing [email protected] instead of the respective longer / alternative TLD version of the domain owned by the intended recipient such as exampleinc.om, examplellc.com, myexample.com, example360.com. There is also a bleed of email from strong brands who do not use a dot com extension and those who use creative spelling versions of commonly spelled words.

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Let’s Break It Down.

Total Emails Received in the 30 Day Test: 261

• 132 spam
• 20 LinkedIn (including 4 friend requests to real people at Example)
• 21 emails from Twitter (with 7 people opening new accounts)

That’s 173 emails (66%) which are basically of little importance.

No big deal right?

Wrong. That leaves 88 emails of some significance to intended users. These emails varied across all security aspects of a company, including:

• One thank you note from a senior vice president.
• Three requests for insurance.
• Two proposals from vendors totaling over $126,000 in work.
• Private financial correspondence to an “Example” property manager, who then forwarded the email to the wrong “Example” email address, showing more than a $900,000 balance in an account, the account number, the account owners and more personally identifiable information.
• Several follow-up emails with people thanking them for a conversation, a meeting, etc.
• Loan contracts for a note over $100,000.
• Establishment for a new phone line where the presumably “Example” employee opened the account with her work email.
• Statements for an established wireless account where the user used @example.com email.
• A fully executed real estate purchase and sale contract asking the “Example” employee to have the buyer initial.
• Documents from several outside attorneys to multiple employees of “Example” for internal review.
• A link to the “Example” company’s internal intranet login.
• Several 2015 1099s mailed to “Example” employees for correction.
• A refund request for $21,464 in overpayment of rent to “Example” company from an accounting supervisor.
• Approval designs for custom fit machinery for “Example” company.
• A character and fitness report from a National Bar Association as part of a background check for an applicant.
• Numerous receipts for “Example” employees.
• Multiple Google meeting requests to “Example” employees — from both other employees and outside parties.
• One not-so-subtle email to someone who will never know.

If there is a full-time job analyzing emails sent to the wrong version of a company’s domain name, we may just apply for it. The entertainment value of some of these emails alone was well worth any cut in salary. However, let’s get back to the article…

The Takeaway

If you can afford it, then you need to acquire the preferred version of your domain name. This really isn’t a question.

Not owning the preferred version of your domain exposes your company to so many different negative consequences. From security concerns about confidential information, data collection, HR correspondence and employee communication to brand confusion between employees and customers. And 1,000 reasons in between.

Almost no one will append a word to your company name.

If your company is called Example, no one is going to arbitrarily add Inc., Corp, LLC, Realty, or any other word to an email address.

However, they will shorten the domain name and send sensitive information via email without hesitation. Scary? Yes it is.

The question you should be asking yourself right now is: Do you know what the preferred version of your domain name is?

The preferred version of a domain name is NOT the domain name you like best.

• It is the word your customers and employees remember the most.
• It is the word your employees refer to the company as.
• It is the word you use to explain to people who you are.
• It is the word you possibly spent hundreds of hours coming up with.
• It is the word you have spent (ten or hundreds of) thousands of dollars marketing.

The preferred version of your domain name is all of this and more.

It is not always the domain name you like the best.

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The Value Proposition

Remember, the value of a domain name is not what a domain name broker tells you. The value of a domain name is the “value proposition” it holds to you and your company.

This could be $100 or $10,000,000. It’s a highly personal question for you and your brand and one that no automated appraisal system can ever calculate. The value of a domain name to your brand can only be measured by you and you alone. Whether or not the seller agrees, that’s another story.

Value is not just measured in sales, however. The value proposition of owning the preferred domain name can often lead to stronger brand recognition, greater perceived authority, higher employee loyalty and more. Sometimes just the simple acquisition of the preferred domain name sends employees a better message of long-term dedication than any PowerPoint slide ever will. It can also tell your customers you are growing and becoming more dominant in your industry.

If your company is selling rainbow bracelets on eBay with an average order of $4.25, then owning the best version of your domain name may not be that critical. However, if you’re a million-dollar company, a company handling sensitive information, a company providing data solutions, or 1,000 other types of companies, then you really should understand the important of owning the preferred version of your domain name, what exactly that domain name is, and fight for the dollars to acquire that domain proportionate to the value proposition it holds for you.

Branding is a choice.

You can choose to bet against human nature.

Probably not the best bet.

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Data Collection Notes

1.  Example.com was NOT a high traffic domain name. Only about 700 people naturally visited the domain name in the last 30 days (about 25 a day).
2.  There was no mention or link to any @example.com email anywhere on the domain names landing page for this 30-day period.
3.  All of these emails were sent to [email protected] — not generic emails like info@, support@, webmaster@ example.com, etc. Those were discarded.
4.  No emails were included that resulted from a form submission on the current landing page (hosted by us).

Why Tesla Motors Finally Acquired Tesla.com

– Follow Alan Dunn on Twitter

Elon Musk is no stranger to innovation. Tesla cars lead the world in brand reputation for electric vehicles and last year, Tesla announced the introduction of the Tesla Powerwall home battery. However, for years Tesla never owned the domain name Tesla.com — until now.

According to Andrew Allemann of DomainNameWire, the WHOIS record for the domain name Tesla.com changed on February 17, 2016, to represent a frequently known WHOIS address used by a brand-protection company to acquire domain names.

James Illes from NamePros confirmed the transaction by speaking with seller Mr. Stuart Grossman directly and, if you type in Tesla.com, it now goes to TeslaMotors.com.

How much did Tesla Motors pay?

The rumors have started but we may never know for sure. Companies like Anker, The Texas Rangers and Facebook have paid top dollar to secure preferred versions of their domain. Uber is reported to have traded 1% of company stock to acquire Uber.com.

These days, getting a great domain is no longer cheap. Some may even think Tesla had a right to the name. Oh, that’s so wrong.

The owners of Tesla.com registered the name long before Tesla Motors existed. Another company (Tesla Industries, Inc.) even filed a motion in 2005 to acquire the domain, and well-known intellectual property attorney John Berryhill successfully defended this motion.

A lot of the confusion in domain name rights is simply the equivalent of being the victim of your own success. Companies spend millions building brands but often fail to realize how people truly think. We live in a short-name world and, if you have a unique name like Tesla where marketing efforts have helped establish such high brand awareness, then human nature is to call the company Tesla — not Tesla Motors, Tesla Cars or anything else. Just Tesla.

Did they need Tesla.com?

Maybe not.

But the amount of brand value and brand security acquired by owning this is almost impossible to measure.

How many people email [email protected] every day? How many people type in Tesla.com? What if another company started selling products on Tesla.com that had nothing to do with cars, but was an embarrassment to the brand? It happens all the time.

Just ask Nissan. For over a decade now, Nissan has filed one lawsuit after another to acquire this domain name. It just so happens that the domain is somebody’s (Mr. Uzi Nissan) last name and he has a company called Nissan Computer.

The acquisition of Tesla.com is another leading example of why brands need to pay attention to domain names. At some point it was inevitable that Tesla would do more than just offer cars and the TeslaMotors.com domain wasn’t representative of this growth. Imagine if AmazonBooks was the brand used to try and compete with Netflix — or UberCab was the company trying to sell you data. Both would potentially lose tremendous brand value. However, when you remove the secondary words and simply have Amazon and Uber, then it shows authority and opens the window to innovation without brand dilution. Patrick Swayze said it best in Dirty Dancing: “Nobody puts Baby in the corner.” Well, the wrong domain can put you in a corner. The right domain can open the world.

The world has changed greatly since Joshua Quittner wrote an article over 20 years ago when he personally registered McDonalds.com, but the process of naming is still a challenge many companies fail to recognize until the need is so high that a price tag comes along to match.

Tesla 1. Nissan 0.

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– Follow Alan Dunn on Twitter

– Follow Alan Dunn on Twitter

Building a brand is something every entrepreneur dreams of. Whether it’s the next unicorn, a fashion empire or the local go-to ice cream parlor, your brand name is representative of so much more than your financial statements. It represents your culture, how people connect with you, how customers refer to you, how employees explain what you do and more. The right domain name is a critical part of your brand.

It is also one element that many CMO’s and founders fail to recognize the importance of until its too late (and much more expensive). However, there comes a time when every solid brand will want to upgrade. From Uber to Instagram, Twitter to Anker. Almost every brand matures, and with that maturity comes the need to acquire a better domain name.

Paul Graham, one of Silicon Valley’s most notable Venture Capitalists and co-founder of Y Combinator, published an article in August, 2015 noting that obtaining the best .com domain name was less about getting users and more about signifying strength.

Paul wrote, “The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness”. He also noted an extremely important point “Sometimes founders know it’s a problem that they don’t have the .com of their name, but delusion strikes a step later in the belief that they’ll be able to buy it despite having no evidence it’s for sale. Don’t believe a domain is for sale unless the owner has already told you an asking price.”

All one has to do is look at Nissan.com to understand the headaches associated with someone else owning a name resembling your brand. Over ten years later, and multiple lawsuits later, Nissan (the car manufacturer) is no closer to obtaining the domain owned by Uzi Nissan (yes, Nissan is a last name), and rightfully so. Why should the domain name go to someone just because they are bigger and more well-known? After all, Nissan is his family heritage and the name of his company.

Brand Stories.

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Company: Uber
Founded: March 2009
Valuation: $62 billion +

Original Domain: UberCab.com
Preferred Domain Name: Uber.com

UberCab, which was founded in 2009 by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, first launched services in San Francisco in 2010, using the eponymous URL www.ubercab.com until it was forced by San Francisco and California regulators to drop the “cab” from its name.

Uber has continued to grow in the past five years, expanding in markets and size. The company that was valued at $60 million in February 2011 now has a valuation of more than $62 billion. It has expanded beyond San Francisco to more than 180 cities in the U.S. and 60 countries around the world, and its car service may be just the beginning — Uber is exploring ways to use its delivery platform in other ways. Recent rollouts include UberEATS, a local food delivery service launched in 12 major cities, and the announcement that Uber would help distribute AMBER alerts via its data network.

At about the same time that it changed its name from UberCab to plain ol’ Uber, Uber bought uber.com from Universal Music Group. Because the young company was cash-strapped, they offered — and UMG accepted — a 2-percent stake in their company in return for the highly desired domain. They later bought this stake back from UMG for $1 million. So, essentially, they acquired this must-have URL, which is now priceless, for a cool million. Not bad at all.

Although Uber may have been originally forced by regulators to change its name from UberCab, it’s undoubtedly a move they would have made at some point anyway. After all, Uber is essentially a technology company, and their continual forays into other services using their delivery platform shows that they know this and are looking at the ways to best monetize it. Uber as a brand is both highly adaptable to a number of scenarios (i.e., UberEATS, UberHEALTH, Uber EVENTS) and very valuable. After all, “uber” means the best of whatever you are, and Uber is striving to be just that for a number of things. And they’ve got a boatload of uber domain names in their portfolio to prove it. Uber cool.

TAKEAWAY:

UberCab had no chance of ever becoming a verb.

They needed the domain to reflect their ever-growing popularity and authority in the marketplace. The word Uber (by itself) did and when your brand becomes a verb you know something is working. Plus Uber is a technology company — they are not just a cab. Imagine if Amazon was called AmazonBooks…

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Company: Twitter
Founded: 2006
Valuation: ~ $19 billion

Original Domain: twttr.com
Preferred Domain Name: Twitter.com

Twitter was first developed by Jack Dorsey and Noah Glass while they were working at Odeo, a podcasting company, in 2006. Dorsey envisioned the service, which went by “twttr,” as an SMS-based service that people could use to track their friends through status updates. Users would send a text to one main number and that text would then be broadcast out to all of their friends. SMS short codes are five digits, so they tried to get twttr, but Teen People were already using it (well, they were using txttp, which is numerically the same as twttr).

A bird enthusiast originally owned the Twitter.com domain, and company co-founders weren’t willing to spend the money to buy the domain name from him until they were confident their platform would catch on. (An early logo features bubble-font lettering in green, making “twttr” look more like “twtta,” which we kind of love.) A lot of joking references have been made to the long-running Wheel of Fortune television game show, at the fact that within just six months, the powers-that-be were willing to purchase the necessary vowels to take control of Twitter.com. It may have seemed like a big deal then — since Odeo had basically foundered and Ev Williams had bought back the stock from investors and taken control of both Odeo and Twitter — but the reported $7500 paid for the Twitter.com domain makes us wonder, from the perspective of a decade’s hindsight, why they even waited at all.

TAKEAWAY:

The Twitter founders got a bargain by getting their preferred domain name early in the game, before even they knew how successful the service would become.

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Company: Anker
Founded: 2009
Valuation : $200 million +++

Original Domain: ianker.com
Preferred Domain Name: anker.com

So Yang, a senior engineer at Google, returned to his native China in 2011 to found the Anker brand. Four years later the company is reportedly doing over $100M in sales annually and is consistently one of Amazon’s top sellers.

With rumored plans to go public in 2017 its no wonder they upgraded from ianker.com to Anker.com in June, 2015 paying a reported $130,000 USD for the domain name.

TAKEAWAY:

The first look at iAnker poses a question of who they are? Is it I AnKer, are they trying to say I An Ker? This upgrade to eliminate brand confusion were dollars well spent.

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Company: Bitly
Founded: 2008
Valuation: A Lot.

Original Domain: Bit.ly
Preferred Domain Name: Bitly.com

Bitly began in early 2008, with an initial $1.5 million in seed funding from New York City-based VC firm BetaWorks (they also chipped in more money during another round two years later). At the time it was one of a handful of URL shortening companies, including TinyUrl.com, and it has since emerged as the dominant player in the field.

Bitly never seemed to have a problem getting users to use a domain with an uncommon .ly extension, but the company began redirecting bit.ly to bitly.com in 2011. Libya, which owns and controls the .ly extension, closed down one or two other domains, accusing them of being anti-Muslim. However, some experts believe that Libya was only able to do this because those sites let their domains expire, though it can enforce the requirement on country codes that users must have a local presence. Either way, the bit.ly domain has been extended through May 2022.

Bitly is not the only URL link shortener out there and with the acquisition of Bitly.com they now have a top level domain to compliment the brand. Think Google’s Goo.gl, Twitter’s t.co, YouTube’s youtu.be, etc. The brand names stand alone as domain names while shorteners live on in other extensions (t.co, goo.gl).

TAKEAWAY:

By shifting to Bitly.com instead of domain hack bit.ly, the company now comes across as more than just a one-trick pony and shows the authority that tech companies need.

It also reduces the risk of operating under a domain name that is is regulated by the Libyan government. This risk alone made it worth upgrading due to the unpredicitability of how some countries regulate country code extensions.

Imagine being a company founder and waking up to this article referencing an extension your company is formed around.

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Company: Square
Founded: 2009
Valuation: ~ $3 billion

Original Domain: squareup.com
Preferred Domain Name: square.com

When Jack Dorsey (Twitter’s co-founder) and his friend Jim McKelvey originally thought up the idea of Square, which would allow merchants to accept credit card payments via smartphones, the story is that they went to the dictionary and came across the word “square.” Connotations of the word that fit their concept included the expressions “fair and square” and “square up,” which means to settle a deal (with money, one hopes, not with fists). It didn’t hurt that using Square as the company’s name also gave them a design for their hardware, either.

Not unexpectedly, square.com was not available when the company launched, so Square took instead the domain squareup.com, which was a good second-choice pick. More recently, Square bought the square.com domain for a reported millions of dollars.

TAKEAWAY:

The company is consistently referred to as Square in media everywhere. There was no logical argument NOT to acquire square.com. Our guess is thousands of people email someone @square.com every month thinking they were reaching squareup.com. This email vulnerability alone (especially for a payments processing company) is enough to warrant paying top dollar for the preferred domain.

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Company: DropBox
Founded: June 2007
Valuation: $10 billion+

Original Domain: getdropbox.com
Preferred Domain Name: dropbox.com

DropBox launched services in 2008, using the getdropbox.com domain. The company began as an online data storage system back before the idea of “the Cloud” was as ubiquitous as it is today. In 2009, with users and traffic growing daily, DropBox filed court papers against what it deemed a squatter on the dropbox.com domain, which had been a parked site until it began hosting links to DropBox competitors. They cited the fact that traffic to dropbox.com was growing and they were losing an immeasurable number of potential customers who were visiting the site to find DropBox and not necessarily knowing to go to getdropbox.com. Although financials are unclear, by October 2009 — as TechCrunch reports — DropBox was finally using “the domain everyone thought it [already] had.”

Let’s remember a key point here. Secondary words like GET, INC, LLC, CORP, PLAY, etc. are not your brand, nor will people (including employees) remember them. What people remember, and what the media often refers to, is the primary word of your company name. We live in a short world. Your domain needs to be short.

TAKEAWAY:

This story is a perfect example of the difference between a good-enough domain and the perfect domain. Getdropbox.com was a good choice of URL for a startup when DropBox found that its first choice was unavailable and it needed to roll out its product and business. However, once its product became successful and word started spreading, potential customers assumed they would find the recommended site at the product’s URL. The need to acquire the preferred domain (dropbox.com) became almost mandatory.

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Company: Facebook
Founded: 2004
Valuation: $250 billion (mid-2015)

Original Domain: thefacebook.com
Preferred Domain Name: Facebook.com

When Mark Zuckerberg first launched “The facebook” while still an undergrad at Harvard, he was said to have named the social platform after the papers that were distributed to freshmen to tell them more about other students and staff. The platform rapidly expanded outside of Harvard to other Boston-based colleges and then colleges and universities nationwide. In August 2005, Zuckerberg spent $200,000 to purchase facebook.com and dropped “the” from the company name and its URL. While that was no small amount for a year-old company, a decade later Facebook easily shelled out $8.5 million for FB.com, which tells a lot.

Facebook wasn’t a new concept at the time — MySpace had launched a year earlier, based on Friendster’s original concept — but Zuckerberg was able to build and grow it into the wildly successful social platform it is today. While he may have been able to name it anything he wanted and still have it turn into the 800-pound gorilla in the industry, the history of branding shows that one-word names seem to find the most success. And when your name becomes synonymous with the activity your product actually does (i.e., Hoover), you know you’ve caused a societal shift. Zuckerberg has always been a visionary, and streamlining both the company name and its domain name in the early years undoubtedly helped Facebook on its meteoric ride. Plus, it appears to have helped save the company the millions of dollars it would have needed later on to get its coveted domain name.

TAKEAWAY:

Anytime a company drops THE from a domain name, it becomes more much authoritative. You never want to be known as THE ____ company.

Imagine our world if brands used THE in domain names. THEcocacola.com, THEFedex.com, THEtwitter.com .. Oh please, shoot me now.

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Company: Instagram
Founded: March 2010
Valuation: Billions.

Original Domain: instagr.am
Preferred Domain Name: Instagram.com

Instagram was launched in October 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger as a mobile photo and video-sharing social platform. In a little more than a year, it had 10 million users. Facebook acquired the app in 2012 and it continues to grow to this day, especially among the younger crowd, who have grown up with smartphones and image sharing, and prefer the social network to Facebook.

Instagram didn’t just come out of nowhere. Systrom had actually developed, and gotten funding for, a prototype of an app called “Burbn,” which was a location-based check-in app similar to Foursquare. However, after receiving $500,000 in investments and hiring Krieger as the engineer, they looked at Burbn and decided it was too cluttered and needed to be stripped down. Because the photo component was the most popular one with beta users, they kept that feature — along with comments and “like” capabilities — and started again. They named the new app “Instagram,” an amalgam of “instant” and “telegram” that also sounded “camera-y,” in the words of Systrom.

Nobody, not even the two founders, could imagine how rapidly their app would be downloaded from the moment it appeared in the Apple App store. Less than four months after launch, Instagram secured $7 million in a round of funding, putting its valuation at $20 million. At the time, Bloomberg Business noted that the company didn’t even have “real company” accoutrements, such as its own permanent Web address. It was using instagr.am.

Systrom made the decision to pay $100,000 to the owner of the Instagram domain name in January 2011. In 2014, however, a relative of the seller denied that the seller had had the authorization to sell the domain, and wanted the domain name back. Facebook won the 2014 UDRP case, which also included 21 other similar domains that were a typo or two away from the Instagram.com URL.

TAKEAWAY:

Domain hacks look cool but should always be secondary URL’s. When instagr.am launched practically everybody called it Instagram –- they didn’t pronounce it instgr.am (can you even pronounce that?). Always try to acquire the domain your employees and customers will pronounce by default.

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Company: Foursquare
Founded: 2009
Valuation: $250 million+

Original Domain: playfoursquare.com
Preferred Domain Name: foursquare.com

After Dennis Crowley sold Dodgeball to Google in 2005 and then left the company in 2007, he went on to create Foursquare — essentially the next-generation of Dodgeball’s location-based social network — in 2009. While you wouldn’t be the first to wonder whether Crowley loves playground games, he has stated in the past that he always wanted to use the name “Foursquare,” but settled first on Dodgeball when the foursquare.com domain wasn’t available.

When he started all over again, he had no such qualms and just went with playfoursquare.com to get the new company going. And it did start out as a mobile gaming app tied into the location-based services, so that “play” in the URL made sense. After Foursquare’s first round of funding, the acquisition of foursquare.com was a top priority. In fact, in mid-2014, Foursquare spun its gamification component into a separate app called “Swarm,” (the domain is for sale) and became even less about gaming and more about personalized local search.

While Foursquare users don’t pay for the service, the company has worked to leverage its knowledge of locations and user visits for revenue-making purposes. Many products and platforms use the Foursquare API — including Twitter, which uses it to geo-tag tweets — and the company’s deep data is anything but child’s play.

TAKEAWAY:

The removal of “play” in their domain makes them sound a little more grown up and, more importantly, shows that their Foursquare service means serious business (regardless of the fact that they briefly, and unintentionally, let the domain name expire in March 2010).

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What does this show?

Simple. It shows there is a proven method for choosing the right domain name.

We live in a world where consumers (and employees) embrace the natural, short versions of domain names. All of these companies (and thousands more) have invested in a better domain name for reasons that make sense across the board including economics, brand recognition, email security and more.

If you haven’t considered upgrading your domain name then maybe you should.

You never want to bet against human nature.

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– Follow Alan Dunn on Twitter

Google Alphabet – A Naming Lesson for Mortals

When your name is Google, it’s only logical to own the alphabet.

Yesterday, Google announced the consolidation of its companies under a new corporate brand: Alphabet. In reference to the new name, Co-Founder Larry Page said, “We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha-bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark).”

Within minutes, the wires were flooded with opinions about this naming choice, especially focused on Google’s choice of using the domain name abc.xyz for the new brand. The Washington Post penned an article titled “Here’s what happens when you try to find Google’s new parent company, Alphabet, on the Internet”.

It describes how Alphabet.com is owned by BMW and the twitter handle @alphabet is owned by one Chris Andrikanich, a self-proclaimed geek in Ohio. Ironically, this brand announcement came the day after Paul Graham, one of the most vocal people in the start-up community, wrote an article stating that, if you have a U.S. start-up called “X” and you don’t own x.com, you should probably change your name.

All of this news has made for an interesting couple of days in the naming space. Why would Google use a .xyz extension? Why not build on a .com domain? Many different answers have been floating around but the answer is a lot easier when you look at the buyer.

Google is the world’s third most-valuable brand, behind Apple and Samsung. This means Google can brand anything. It doesn’t matter if its .xyz, .123 or .supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. You will learn to type in abc.xyz and you will like it. For Google, it doesn’t matter what the extension is—what matters is what the extension represents and, from our perspective, abc.xyz sounds a lot more Google-esqe than abc.com or alphabet.com. Alphabet is also not the consumer brand, but a non-consumer-facing umbrella company for the Google family of brands, which lessens the importance of having a .com domain (if there is any when your name is Google).

Google’s use of abc.xyz is likely the most significant event to date for adoption of the new GTLDs (generic top level domains). Millions of people will visit this site and the .xyz extension will be branded forever as a solid domain name extension. Furthermore, because of Google’s adoption, the automatic trust and credibility will trickle over and make people consider .xyz as a choice in naming.

What does this mean for your company?

Using a new GTLD is certainly enticing, but there is so much more to naming than simply choosing what URL to use. For starters, Google can brand anything and, well, you aren’t Google.

The key takeaways from this new brand announcement are:

Simple is better.

Forget about three-word names and unpronounceable words. Choose a single or two-word combination if at all possible.

You need a story.

Alphabet will forever be a memorable talking point since it doesn’t just stand for letters but also for “alpha-bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark)” and “a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations” that form the core of Google’s business model. What story does your name tell?

Eliminate confusion.

This starts with owning the best version of your domain name and also making sure you own the exact match in social handles. This doesn’t always mean .com—what it does mean is consistency among the URL and social handles. If The Washington Post is confused, then you can bet your customers will be too.

Remember, you are not Google.

It takes millions (and millions) of dollars to brand globally. The .com extension is already branded and remains the dominant extension for now. However, Francois Carrillo of Domaining.com said it best: “Times are changing, slowly but surely, and resistance is futile.”

If your budget allows it, then the cost of acquiring the .com will be worth it to eliminate potential confusion. But it’s not the only option anymore.

At the end of the day, if you build something cool, people will come. The Internet is truly like a Field of Dreams, no matter what your domain name extension is.

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NameCorp™ is a boutique digital agency with an insane appetite for naming and more than 20 years of experience. Contact us to learn more about finding a better domain name.

For most entrepreneurs, the idea of having their own business is a primary objective. But for some, building a brand is the ultimate goal.

However, building a brand is very different than building a company. One could even say brand building requires an entirely different sub-set of skills that only a few have ever mastered.

The truth is, you don’t need a company to build a brand: What you need are followers.

Today’s world is very different than yesterday’s. Many personal brands are built on YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, some intentionally and some unintentionally. A brand could be a company (AOL), a product (Rubik’s Cube) or even an individual (Kim Kardashian).

No matter how a brand is built there are common elements to successful brands. Some of these elements are created by your marketing team while others are created by employees or followers.

Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, wrote: “Mass advertising can help build brands, but authenticity is what makes them last. If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.”

This is one of the greatest quotes about branding and is true today as much as it was when he wrote it in 1997. Why? Because it sums up that great brands are built not just by ads, but from the total experience.

How many times have great brands been tarnished by poor customer service or luxury brands cheapened trying to appeal too widely? And how many times have we fallen in love with a brand, creating a relationship that has stood the test of time?

Building a great brand is not easy. It’s likely the hardest challenge any company has. But when you do it successfully, the rewards are plentiful.

According to Brand Finance®, Apple is the most valuable brand in the world. What is even more interesting is that most consumers will likely feel certain emotions about, and some kind of connection to, almost every brand on this page before thinking about their product. Companies without high brand value do not have this consumer connection.

Having a great product and customers is just not enough. There are several things every brand owner should ask themselves :

Is Your Brand Authentic?

People are collectively smart (excluding those nominees for the Darwin Awards) and authenticity is a key element for a successful brand. Whether it’s a luxury good, an honest review or a promise of a low-cost, high-quality alternative, what people want to know more than anything else is if you’re authentic. No fakes have stood the test of time.

Do You Have Shared Values?

A key extraction from Howard Schulz’s quote is: “If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.” We would like to dissect this a bit deeper and define “people” as all people involved with a company and not just customers. From employees to vendors to competitors—the more a brand authentically shares value with all people, the greater the emotions invoked for the brand.

Are You Integrating Completely?

Having a person at hello is not enough. The greatest brands in the world incorporate their brand into everything, from product packaging to logo silhouettes to a single font. From an outside perspective, what looks relatively simple is often the result of countless hours spent planning a brand’s integration.

Do You Have a Single Voice

Great brands understand the value of a single voice. They also understand how to minimize damage control by not having too many people tell the same story. It’s very rare to hear Google employees discussing the search engine’s future, or Home Depot employees describing the store culture.

A single voice is critical. Otherwise, your brand may never be consistent and this, in turn, will undermine your authenticity.

Are You Consistent?

Consistency is crucial. Imagine if Starbucks baristas didn’t wear green and everyone could choose a different uniform color. Imagine if Apple stopped paying attention to design. What if Tesla tried to sell regular fuel cars at the same time?

Any of these actions would likely result in only negative consequences for the brand. Consistency and Authenticity go hand in hand, and many times the only way to be authentic is to be consistent.

Branding (in theory) is pretty straight forward but in reality, it is far more difficult. After all, the ultimate goal is to earn the love of others and that is something even the best world leaders find hard to do.

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NameCorp™ is a boutique digital agency with an insane appetite for naming and more than 20 years of experience. Contact us to learn more about finding a better domain name.