Recently a client of ours was approached by a company that buys and sells domain names. It was claiming to represent another company that wanted to buy our client’s domain name—but remain anonymous.
I was intrigued and took to the internet to search through all of the new products coming out with names that were similar to our client’s domain name. I narrowed it down to one product that is sold by an extremely large company—a product that was 100% wholesome and was featured alongside great Americana imagery like people playing baseball, going out for picnics, and standing around in gazebos.
That is when it all made sense: The huge company wanted our client’s domain name because his products are for “adults only.”
I recognized that this could be a significant opportunity for our client to sell his domain name for a good sum of money. The corporate giant presumably did not want their healthy, wholesome image to be tarnished by potential customers accidentally going to my client’s 18+ website.
Unfortunately, our client had not done anything to promote his website, while the big corporation had made great efforts to promote its new product on social media. As a result, if unsuspecting, conservative, all-American types were to enter our client’s business name into a search engine, they would have to surf all the way to the third or fourth page of results to find it.
It turns out that the large retailer would have liked to secure our client’s domain name in case some wholesome person typed the wrong address—but they were keenly aware that people are not using domain names as much as they used to. In fact on Twitter, companies use custom and shortened .urls to redirect people to their full websites—without the user ever having to look at the domain name.
Since domain names are not king anymore, our client’s lack of self-promotion on social media channels lowered the value of his unique name. The large retailer offered him a relatively small sum, which my client accepted.
If our client had the economic wherewithal to pump up his website—thus becoming a leading search engine result—that could have been a strategy not only to sell more adult toys but also to be a legitimate problem to be resolved with a much larger purchase price. But the fatal error was having never invested in the promotion of his website on social media; his otherwise valuable digital real estate was rendered valueless.
The takeaway for domain owners is familiar to anyone who owns a trademark: Use it, use it, and use it some more. Moss doesn’t grow on a rolling stone or a website that is promoted across multiple channels.
To find out more about domain names, trademarks, or other intellectual property issues, contact us here.
