Roadtrip shows prevalence of domain names, even for small town businesses.
If you took a lot of family vacations in the car as a child then you probably recall many road games: finding all 50 license plates, finding the letters of the alphabet on billboards, etc. Today I drove from Austin to Houston and decided to count the number of URLs on billboards and other signs. I know that URLs are on many billboards in large cities, but I was particularly interested in the number of URLs I’d see in “the country”.
Austin is about a 3 hour drive to Houston. I left my house in West Austin and drove past the Austin airport on Highway 71, which is basically on the edge of Austin. Just after passing the airport I started counting URLs on billboards, store signs, etc. Highway 71 is a rural highway in this area, passing through small towns like Bastrop and Smithville. I was amazed at the number of small businesses that had domain names advertised on billboards or their store signs.
There was The Busy B, which advertises the domain TheBusyB.com on at least two billboards. There’s American Fireworks, which uses BigThunderFireworks.com. There was also a sign for free land in Bastrop courtesy of the Bastrop Economic Development Corporation (which proudly advertises BastropEDC.org). Of course there were URLs for bigger companies as well, including PizzaHut.com and RedCross.org.
Altogether there were 35 URLs from the Austin airport until I hit I10 and headed to Houston. I saw another 33 on I10 until I hit Highway 99 in Houston, when I got tired of counting. That’s 68 domains traveling one way, and I’m sure I missed many of them.
This shows how important domain names are. Most businesses have them or are getting them. Most new businesses will get a domain name and are willing to pay more than the registration price if someone else owns the domain.
Some businesses also need a lesson in domain names. If you’re going to bother putting a domain name on a billboard, it should be large enough to read. Squinting while driving at 60 miles an hour is not an option.
Perhaps the funniest (or saddest, depending on how you look at it) sign I saw read:
QualityConcrete&
SwimmingPools.com
At first I thought it was a sign for swimmingpools.com, and I was impressed that a small business owned that. Then I realized the domain was on two lines. Then I realized that it had an ampersand (&) in it, which can’t be used in a domain name. Yes, this person was trying to advertise the URL “qualityconcreteandswimmingpools.com”, but I doubt many people can understand that from his sign.
Patrick McDermott says
Hi Andrew,
A while back you gave a valuable lesson to everyone that it is to one’s benefit to get a domain name that is easy to recall.
You had a dental emergency and couldn’t remember how to spell your dentist’s name but you did remember (recall) the domain name your dentist used on his business card.
For everyone’s benefit that domain was JawPain .com.
I wonder how many of the 68 domains you saw w
you would be able to recall because they are “recallable”.
TheBusyB.com for The Busy B- recallable, I think. And relates to the Company name.
BigThunderFireworks.com for American Fireworks -maybe recallable.
Too bad they couldn’t get
AmericanFireworks .com.
BastropEDC.org – for Bastrop Economic Development Corporation. Not recallable IMHO
andI Ad they did not have the sense to reg the .Com version of their domain.
For under $10 ,they won’t protect their domain property and i find this is the norm with many non-profits.
Maybe juice for another article?
Can you recall any of the other domains?
Patrick
Editor says
Patrick, that’s a great point. Even TheBusyB.com might have been mis-remembered had I not been paying attention. I would have likely remember it as TheBusyBEE.com.
I checked the BastropEDC.com domain when I got to Houston and you’re right, it’s not registered. There are many non-profits in this same case. I was giving a helping domain name hand to a church the other day. They’ve had the .org name of the church registered since 1998, but not the .com.
So what if someone remembers it as .com? Won’t they find the .org eventually? Maybe. But what if someone decides to put adult content on the .com? That would sting.
If I think about the domain names I really remember from the trip, I’d say PizzaHut.com and Lennar.com (home builder, saw their buildboard many times). I wanted to remember some of the other’s because I’m interested in their services, but I keep typing the domains I “remembered” and apparently they’re wrong.
Graham says
Interesting article. It is also an increasing trend when starting a business to decide the business name around the availability of a good domain name. This is particularly important where the domain is available to be registered or acquired at the reasonable price. In other words, domain name availability driving the business naming process rather than deciding the business name only to find out you can’t acquire the related domain because it is already in use.
My wife named her business after a brainstorming session but importantly a key requirement was that the domain was available to be registered. This can only be good for domain name owners.
Editor says
Graham, you can even take that to the next level. When I named my last business I actually used some of the domain name generators to come up with possible names!
Editor says
Here’s an interesting pickup of this story:
http://tinyurl.com/27jz24