flicker.com piggybacks on any success o' flickr.com e.t.c. , The Advantage Of Owning The Generic Domains .com

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The Advantage Of Owning Generic Domains
Published May 15, 2007 in Domain Names.

No one will argue there’s already a shortage with type-in generic domains.
Now take it 10 years forward, or 20.

A new startup is founded and its founders are looking for a domain name for their business.

Let’s say, just a random example ( ) their concept is to create a
funeral homes directory, but of course,
Funeralhomes.com is registered many years ago.

What are they to do? They go and find a different domain of course, say
Fuenralhomes-newname.com.

They put their site together,

hypothetically speaking,
a better site then[[than]] the current leader Funeralhomes.com, and start to market.

They happen to be experts and do extremely good job marketing, and achieve the unimaginable
– they become market leader.

What is happening with the traffic to funeralhomes.com
though?
users
who do not remember the complicated/creative
name of the startup
[[[[[[[[[ Fuenralhomes-newname.com e.t.c. ]]]]]]]]]
tend to remember the concept behind the name
(especially if they heard of the generic before),
and they type funeralhomes.com.

Traffic leakage goes up at funeralhomes.com
thanks to the new startup. Even if funeralhomes.com goes out of business traffic will still be there
thanks to the new startup.

the more traffic the startup command,
the more leakage.
[[[[[[[[[ 'the edittor2w notes : :::::
that's ex-actly the tragedy happenning 4[for]
flicker.com v. flickr.com
[[[[ o k o k , not so much a tragedy 4[for] flicker.com ]]]]]
]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]

How’s that for motivation??
The cost gets higher as some users, even though acquired at great cost, “get lost”
This by the way is happening today every single second of the day and most companies,
I would guess over 99.999% of them, don’t realize it.

This is the long term power of generics.

It isn’t just about today,
It is also about those startups 20 years from now.
Whatever they gonna do, and those who succeed,
will (fortunately to generic domain owners) keep leaking traffic to generic domains.

5 Responses to “The Advantage Of Owning Generic Domains”

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5 John
Jun 11th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Recently,
I finally ‘realized’ the power of generic domains while working on an Adwords campaign for a small business.
Either I pay Google to send traffic based on keyword searches to this particular business,
or I buy all the generic domain names around this business
and drive that type in traffic to this website.
Generics alone won’t solve the traffic issue, I’d still need to advertise.
But acquiring good generics would be a one time high-ish cost if they are already registered
(then there’s just annual renewals) for x amount of traffic.
Google Adwords, on the other hand, wants to be fed according to clicks or impressions.
And I could easily pay 600 dollars a month on Adwords.
That makes
spending 5 - 10k for good generics look cheap.
I wonder if Google will begin to notice if advertisers begin picking up generics and forwarding that traffic to their sites. And
I wonder if Google will step in and start sucking up domain names.
They sure have the computing power to do so.

—-ANSWER—-
Congratulations!I don’t think it is meaningful loss to big search engines that people have some direct traffic such as from domain names, as businesses need to expand, as you indicated, even with a good generic you are still going to buy traffic from the engines.As far as Google/Yahoo/MSN getting into the game and acquiring domains, I believe that is the end goal (wishful thinking anyways) of med size companies such as Marchex, NameMedia, ,Demand Media, Ireit.

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