Sk*rt Skirts Losing Its Domain
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Company with miserable domain name wins arbitration.
I wrote about Sk*rt, pronounced skirt, and its horrible domain name sk-rt.com last November. I don’t need to go into the details about why this is such a bad name, but I hypothesized that the owners of Skirt.com would go after Sk-rt.com:
Not only is Sk*rt sending typo traffic to Skirt.com, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Skirt.com sued Sk*rt. My advice would be to not do this; just sit back and enjoy the steady stream of well targeted traffic hitting your site! In fact, if Skirt.com adds the “digg” type functionality seen on Sk-rt.com, it could take a big chunk out of Sk*rt’s business.
Skirt.com didn’t take my advice. The site for a womens’ magazine called Skirt filed for arbitration under UDRP to get its hands on the domain Sk-rt.com. The magazine lost for a number of reasons, not the least of which is it didn’t actually acquire the Skirt.com domain until after Sk-rt.com was registered (minor oversight I suppose).
But I go back to my original suggestion: why not just free load off of sk-rt.com? I suspect that about 1/3 of first time word-of-mouth visitors to Sk*rt end up landing at Skirt.com.
Fantastic post - GREAT STUFF
Skirt Magazine might be digging themselves into a hole… I see that their site is using the * just like sk*rt’s “*” all over the place.
@ Scott - I noticed similarities the first time I looked at the site (as I pointed out in my original post). I don’t have the inclination to go into archive.org and see when they started using those designs, but I’m curious…
[...] * Skirt.com Loses out to retrieve sk*rt.com. Hmmm, I wonder why… [...]
I am not a fan at all of hyphenated domain names. However, I think this domain name “sk-rt.com” is innovative and even memorable.