Protect your brand’s domain?

Posted Sunday, April 29, 2007 at 12:08am in Blogging, Technology  | 

When registering a url for an organisation it’s probably best to purchase all available top level domain names (.com, .co.uk, .biz, .net etc). It makes sense for a couple of reasons with, I would say, the most predominant being stopping cybersquatters from sitting on your brand url.

But what about personal sites like blogs? Think the same rules apply? Is it actually worth shelling out a substantial amount of money which would have to be paid yearly or once every two years to keep your url safely as your own? Not sure if I do. I own (or should I say I rent?) the .com and .co.uk of the domain ‘prblogger’. However, a quick search today shows that someone has decided to register a couple of other top level domains of prblogger too:

prblogger.net, prblogger.info and prblogger.eu have all be registered. NOTE: I purposely haven’t linked to any as one of them redirects to a pornographic website.

Fair enough. Who am I to complain? If I wanted them I should have registered them. Although I do feel a little uneasy about the porn one but what can you do? It’s not just me either. I ran a check on urls for a few others. GigaOM has seven top level domain names of his .com version registered by (I’m assuming) other people:

gigaom.co.uk, gigaom.org, gigaom.net, gigaom.biz, gigaom.mobi, gigaom.tv and gigaom.info

Techcrunch has:

techcrunch.biz, techrunch.eu,techcrunch.net, techcrunch.mobi, techcrunch.tv

As of writing, the above link only to advertising and not Frankie Vaughan so perhaps it is a nice little money earner to own top level domains of blogs of a large following like Gigaom and Techcrunch? But why use mine? My traffic is million miles away from theirs.

Personally, I’d find it funny if someone made money from a prblogger top level domain. In two years I haven’t made a penny. Heh! :)

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