Not-so-typo domain of popular Flickr.com service accepting offers.
I’ve never understood why these Web 2.0 companies have such horrible domain names. It’s hard enough getting people to remember your web address. So why drop vowels out of your domain? In January I wrote:
As a domainer, I look at a lot of these web 2.0 companies and laugh at their domain names. They are perhaps the worst domain names a company could ever choose. Flickr.com? (A Yahoo! company (NASDAQ: YHOO). Talkr.com? Frappr.com? The only thing these domains are good for are sending traffic to Flicker.com, Talker.com, and Frapper.com.
Well, the owners of Flicker.com have put it up for sale and have turned down 14 offers in the past two months. The latest offer was for $600,000. According to a notice on the Flicker.com web page, the site attracts over 150,000 type-ins per month. I believe it — it has an Overture+Ext score of 4,301. Although most of these visitors are looking for the popular photo sharing site owned by Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), the Flicker.com notice doesn’t mention the site and goes out of its way to point out that Flicker is a generic term.
The final sale price will depend on if someone is willing to take on any legal risk associated with this domain name. Sure, the domain predates the Flickr service and Flickr is a horrible name, but that doesn’t mean someone can’t sue if the domain is used for a similar purpose.
I totally agree with your comment about “these Web 2.0 companies have such horrible domain names”. If you read TechCrunch, there are countless Web2.0 startups with terrible domain names popping up everyday!
“As a domainer, I look at a lot of these web 2.0 companies and laugh at their domain names.”
Andrew,
Did you see this ?
http://snipr.com/CrazyNames
Patrick
Thanks Patrick. The folksonomy.org article hits the nail on the head.
Stumbleupon, tripover,fallaround……………rollyo, bebo, crusty.
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For the fun of it, I purchased the name “staffr.com” and without marketing, I fear type-in traffic will continue to virtually flatline.
Oh! Well, domaining and exploring the limitless possibilities is still a lot of fun ; )
This is cyber sqatting and domainers should not register typo names.
i think they have silly names because of the possibility of trademark infringement.
anytime a site gets big, you can be sure there are other site owners that get jealous. and they contact their lawyers, wanting to sue.
so if you pick an absurd name that no other business would want, you make the possibilty of TM infringement more remote.
that’s my guess. it’s only a guess.
another theory is web developers have no idea how to name a business and just follow the trend of having an absurd name like so many other web companies do. this is perhaps a stronger theory. web fanatics are notorious trend followers. to call them “sheep” is putting it lightly.
Based on my experience, Flickr actually is not a great way to share photos with family and friends – it’s much worse than Yahoo Photos used to be. The main problem is that it’s not easy to share a group of photos without creating a permanent, separate “set.” For those who like to send around groups of photos, the number of “sets” you need to create quickly gets too large, and they become unmanageable.
Flickr should allow you to use Organizr to create a group of photos and send them using Yahoo Mail, without having to create a permanent set. This would make the service a lot more useful for sharing purposes.
Having said this, you can work around this problem by installing the Flickr application from within Yahoo Mail. That application isn’t as easy to use as Organizr, but it does allow you to send groups of photos without creating a permanent set.