Healthcare.com highlights a big challenge to developing a site on something other than .com.
What’s one of the biggest challenges to creating a website on a non .com domain, at least in the United States?
Many people looking for your site will inevitably type in .com instead.
VentureBeat just wrote about the owners of HealthCare.com, who have been laughing all the way to the bank ever since the healthcare exchange launched on Healthcare.gov a few weeks ago.
“We generated over 100,000 quote requests in October, and since HealthCare.gov launched the site traffic has increased 10 times,” Healthcare.com owner Jose Vargas told VentureBeat.
Vargas also owns Healthcare.org and .net. Apparently .org sites can benefit from leakage, too, if users associate the site with a non-profit or the government. Traffic to Healthcare.org spiked from basically nothing to 60,000 visitors overnight.
Vargas bought the domain name for over $2 million.
All the more reason the U.S. government made a big mistake by letting Medicaid.com expire and fall into private hands.
rellife says
Some ppl have all the luck in the world 😉
BBB says
Domain “Traffic Leakage” is the next big domain business to come from the new TLDs. A person could make a living fixing holes for big and small companies alike.
http://youtu.be/flGdFvkjMPU
thelegendaryjp says
Great period of time for him to make that $2M look like peanuts, good for him!
Scott says
I was shocked to see how little traffic HealthCare.com got prior to the gov website being released.
rellife says
They had over 100K a day visits, that’s not little. They’re in the lead-gen business and allot of their business is off the grid (affiliates, ad buy) when it comes to visible measurable traffic.
Scott says
They had over 100k quote requests — not unique visitors.
Look at the Google Analytics they published. They weren’t anywhere close to 100k visits prior to the gov launching their site.
domo sapiens says
Leakage? make that ‘HEMORRHAGE!’
Inconvenient facts/news for the New gTLD crowd?
O Dot co,
deli. cio. us
healthcare .gov
any clearer?
James says
Given the current state of affairs at Healthcare.gov, Sebalius may welcome the leaks.