It’s Hot.com, but they don’t own the domain name.
Bill Sweetman just returned from DomainFest in Hong Kong. While there, he stopped in a french fry and froyo establishment and was surprised by what he saw.
His surprise wasn’t just that the place specializes in frozen yogurt and french fries. It was the name of the place–Hot.com.
It would be quite surprising for an establishment in like this to own such a great domain name. But it doesn’t.
This place is called Hot.com but it doesn’t own the domain name. Have you ever seen a company brand itself as a domain name when it doesn’t own it?
It’s more bizarre than Booking.com’s Booking.yeah ads, since at least booking.yeah isn’t an actual domain name.
If you zoom in on the picture you’ll see Hot.com branding around the french fry. This listing on OpenRice shows a receipt with Hot.com on it.
Just when you thought you’d seen it all…
Xavier.xyz says
Here we have a restaurant called shawarma.com but they don’t own the domain.
Picture here: https://www.zomato.com/photos/pv-res-18150688-r_czMTQzMjg3OTA5#
I guess instead of Shawarma 2000 they decided to go with Shawarma dot com.. odd Branding
thelegendaryjp says
https://www.facebook.com/pages/%E9%BB%84%E5%9F%94-Hotcom/228324017296252
So I googled to see if Hot and yogurt means something I didn’t know about..well 18+ warning so even stranger thing to call your business Hot+Yogurt
Marcas MacÁedha says
Andrew, is it possible that, now, domain names are so marketable they are reversing the usual trend of well known companies having their brand name used in a .com, or other TLD/ccTLD, in this instance, use of the web address will simply bring one to the specified search engine.
Again, thank you for the info. hopefully WIPO or others will not be involved.
Kellie says
There is j.co Donuts. No, they don’t own J.CO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.CO_Donuts
billsweetman says
Aside from the bizarre branding of this place, the other weird thing was that they were serving the fries with melted cheese on top. As a Canadian, I found that dish odd to discover in Hong Kong because fries with melted cheese is a rather obscure Canadian dish called “poutine” although it’s made with cheese curds here in Canada. They also were serving deep fried balls of something … I couldn’t figure out what those were. Maybe the octopus(?) on their logo holds a clue to that? But the frozen yogurt was excellent, and Hong Kong is full of surprises like this place.
Koosah says
You’ve never heard of cheese fries? Now that is odd
Andrew Allemann says
Cheese fries were a staple in the high school cafeteria.
Regg says
Bill, never run to the boarder they serve fries covered in cheese as well lol
John says
JP please don’t link us to your hot yogurt
Josh says
Soory John but I have an exact match for that one lol
DnVre says
Bookings.Hot !
Raymond Chai says
Hot.Pizza
Walt says
Riddle:
Q: What’s the difference between promoting a .com name that you do not own and using a new gtld?
A: No difference. Both inadvertantly send prospects to the corresponding .com with you to get no traffic.
A Mitchell says
Yahoo ran a banner ad campaign promoting its customizable email service. The ads advertised KillerFamily.com as an example. They never owned the domain. Never asked permission to use it. Their customer conversion rates must have suffered as a result. I didn’t know what to do with all the traffic.