Pros and Cons of Being Utube (Not Youtube)
October 16th, 2006Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation specializes in buying and selling Used Tube Mills, Used Pipe Mills and Used Rollforming Machines. Their short and sweet domain name is Utube.com. Millions of users searching for the popular video sharing site Youtube land up at utube.com instead of youtube.com
I read this interesting article at CNN Money about how the company has seen “its site utube.com knocked off line by millions of online searchers looking for video site”. They got an amazing 68 million hits in August.
Well there are disadvantages of getting untargeted site traffic, who come to share their video only to find tubes and pipes and search elsewhere. They turn up no sales and yet drain your web hosting bandwidth making your site unavailable, resulting in expensive webhosting costs.
And the pros are the amazing amount of free publicity and traffic your site generates due to a phonetically similar sounding domain name. Could this site have generated millions of free hits without this buzz (to which I am also contributing now).
Anyway when “CNNMoney.com performed a Google search on the term “utube”, Youtube.com came up in the first” seems to have changed and Google seems to have fixed their site back to top now! Register your domain name with care to target your customers.
Update: Utube.com Sues Youtube.com
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Although it’s essential to register your domain with care. It sometimes could be sheer bad timing. What if utube.com was registered in an era when youtube was not even around.
In which case they would have never thought of somebody registering something called “youtube”.
Although, it would be smart to check phonetically sounding domains which may closely match your desired domain before you go in for registration.
I have this but on a much small scale. My site is BenRichards.co.uk why? because my name is Ben Richards and i’m i the UK. Perfect i thought!
Apparently there is a well known actor in the UK also called Ben Richards and his address ends in .com. I end up getting traffic meant for his site!
I wouldnt mind but when i hosted a forum i got messages from angry people saying i was ripping him off and bing quite abusive!
My site has and never has had anything to do with this actor!
Oh well.
Kapil – you are very right. No one knows when a phonetically similar popular site comes alongside any domain name.
Ben – Thanks for sharing your experience.
Hah hah hah, am a pro ;)
That’s why I selected, U-tubez as my site’s title – http://u-tubez.com :D