Flashback: What's in a Name- Forbes 4/26/00

"If you ever wondered why so many Internet companies have funny names, it's simple--the available pool of addresses ending in .com is drying up, and the only way a company can be a .com anymore is to create a mix of vowels and consonants so awkward that it befuddles English teachers and consumers alike. Consider such oddities as Gadzoox.com, Flooz.com and Xoom.com.

It will certainly be difficult for the new nomenclature to catch on with a public that has come to identify e-commerce inextricably with .com. With 10 million names registered at Network Solutions (NASDAQ: NSOL), .com accounts for 7.8 million names; .net accounts for 1.4 million names; and .org accounts for 800,000. Network Solutions does not monitor the number of names using .mil, .gov, and .edu domains because they are not open to the public at large. So for anyone serious about building a Web presence, it's .com or nothing. But few industry watchers believe new domains will ever measure up to the .com. George Frazier of Idiom, a name and brand identity constancy in San Francisco, says his clients are still mostly going after .com extensions. "It's a gold standard now," Frazier says.

Gib Bintliff, CEO of MarketPlace--which registers .mp names--remains undeterred by the possibility of a flood of new domains. His company's strategy is to avoid the consumer space, and target the corporate customers (specifically business-to-business players) by offering a packaged service including trademark protection.

"Our plans are to market to the intellectual property professionals or in-house counsel. And .mp will provide a way for B2Bs to distinguish themselves," Bintliff says.

Most experts say that for the time being, new companies will continue to do whatever it takes to get a .com name before seeking an alternative. And naming experts believe there are still plenty of names available--even though the two- and three-letter combinations, as well as most generic words in the English language, are taken. All that has done, says Frazier, is force new companies to get creative.

Frazier says that in years to come generic names like drugs.com, cars.com or food.com will scream 1998 because they were obviously created before the mad domain rush. "People go to those sites as a starting point because they don't know where else to go. But you don't want people to come to your site because they don't know anything else, you want them to come to the site because they know you."

Even after spending millions on advertising, few consumers can remember a plain old company name. You throw in an unknown top-level domain and the chances of consumers finding a site drop to nil. In the fierce competition for eyeballs, few companies can afford to lose traffic to an unknown top-level domain. Sure, .tv could be a logical place for TV-related Web sites, but that logic only exists in an alternate universe where .com hasn't already penetrated the American consciousness."