Why do some companies feel it necessary to register dozens of domain names to represent divisions or departments within the company, or different products, services or brands they sell (under the same parent company name)?
This practice is idiotic!
First of all, it is a giant waste of money. I guess the problem with that argument is that domain registration is so cheap that large companies probably don't even notice the cost, even if they do use Network Solutions.
So, cost concerns aside, excessive domain registration is dumb because it hogs domain names. Just because some company sells laundry detergent called Tide doesn't mean they need to a whole domain name for it. The parent company, Proctor & Gamble advertises on their own website that they own like 300 brands. Does it follow that they need 300 domain names, in addition to pg.com, for all those brands? No! I think plenty of other websites could make better use of tide.com than Proctor & Gamble does with their laundry detergent site. frootloops.com is another example. Does one brand of Kellogg's cereal really need it's own domain name?? (it's debatable whether it even needs a web site of it's own, but I'm just arguing against wasteful domain reg. today....) I think frootloops.com could be much better used for a site listing all the crazy people I know. It would be more informative than sugary breakfast cereal, that's for sure. Movie-specific domain names also come to mind. Everytime there a new movie comes out, the studios feel it necessary to register a domain for it. Take sonofthemask.com for example. The fact that it's a sequel already makes it less likely to be a good movie, but regardless of the quality of the movie, some bigshot at the studio decided that nearly every movie needs it's very own domain name? Even stupider is when the movie name is already a registered domain name, so the studio tacks "movie" on the end and registers that as a domain name, such as with: robotsmovie.com. What a bunch of crap. The fact that there is already a robots.com registered should tell those morons that Robots the movie doesn't need it's own domain name, because the there are more useful things to do with such a domain name, and the studio probably owns hundreds of domain names already, and it doesn't need any more.
From someone who owns two domains, and manages ~2 dozen for other people, let me tell you that even a small collection of domains requires plenty of attention. I cannot imagine trying to keep track of hundreds of different domains for one company.. and all for what purpose? There is the domain registration itself to watch over. Better not miss the renewal date, or you could lose the domain and have to buy it back from a squatter for $$$. Microsoft has been embarrased on more than one occasion by not renewing an important domain name. Of course each domain needs it's own DNS settings/zone files on the nameservers, not to mention the host, ns, and mx records, hostmaster email, etc that all needs to be kept up to date or changed when necessary, for each and every domain. If that weren't bad enough, you also have to keep a close eye and a firm grip on your domain records to make sure they aren't hijacked. Domain name hijacking may not be all that common, but the point is, the more domains you have, to more problems you have to worry about and the more work you have to do to maintain them.
Next is the issue of the customer. The poor confused customer dealing with thousands or millions of different domain names. It may not make a difference who the parent company is when we are talking about tide.com vs. pg.com, but let's look at a financial institution; take Citibank for example. You can go to citi.com to find out about the company, but if you want to find out or apply for their credit cards, you go to citicards.com. So, how does one know that citicards.com is really, truly associated with Citibank (or Citi or whatever their preferred name is now)? Most people probably have heard that Citi is the target of many a phishing scheme, so how can I be sure that citicards.com is the real deal and not a clever front designed to dupe me into giving away my name, ss#, credit card#, etc? Checking the ssl certificate is always a good idea before submitting sensitive information on the web, but by hosting their credit card division on a domain name, Citi just adds more doubt to the equation, requiring extra checking and verifying of the domain name and the site. If they would simply use the citi.com domain they already have, I could at least be somewhat more certain that I'm dealing with the same company and not a scammer. Citi is actually on my shit list over the practice of pointless, even ambiguous/confusion domain registrations; because I think they are one of the worst offenders I have encountered. They, at least used to, use a domain called accountonline.com to have their customers log in and manage their credit card account online. Who thought up that crap? Accountonline.com sounds to me like something made up by a scammer to trick gulliable people into handing over their logins and passwords.
I've outlined numberous problems with senseless domain registering. Just to be clear, my gripe is with companies that already have mulitple domains, but which continue to register more for stupid reasons. I believe many companies register many domain names for logical reasons; probably in part because they do not want long URLs for advertising purposes and they don't want to have their customers trying to figure out the difference between a forwardslash and a backslash and .htm vs .html just to get to their product website. I agree that http://pg.com/tide/tidedetergent.html just doesn't look good. My solution to this problem is simple, elegant, and is already in use by a fair number of companies and websites.
In a word: subdomains.
I believe that the use of subdomains can solve a lot if not all of the problems described so far. The hierarchal structure of DNS makes subdomains a natural way for a company to host a website for a product, division, service, brand that they own, while not proliferating domain registration gone crazy. Subdomains eliminate the cost and reduce the required DNS maintenance, while demostrating affiliation with the parent company and their own domain name. Note to Proctor & Gamble... why not: http://tide.pg.com/ ? It's easy to type and remember, and it reinforces the affiliation between Tide and P&G. If Citi were to use citicards.citi.com for their credit cards, they could cut loose a domain name, and gain more trust from me, because I wouldn't have to question the ownership of the parent domain. If microsoft would get smart and use subdomains like passport.microsoft.com, anothercrappyproduct.microsoft.com, etc, they could quit forgetting to register all their pointless domains.
I will give credit were credit is due, and recognize Warner Bros. as one company who is learning. Take a look at these domains promoting Warner Bros films, for example:
http://thematrix.warnerbros.com/
http://armedandfabulous.warnerbros.com/
http://constantinemovie.warnerbros.com/
Now that I've giving a little praise to Warner Bros., I'll smack them down again by pointing out that they've negated the subdomain advantage by also registering and maintaining, as redirects to the just mentioned sites, the following domains:
http://thematrix.com/
http://armedandfabulous.com/
http://constantinemovie.com/
Duh. Warner Bros. almost impressed me, but not once I checked for the duplicate domain names.
Sure, subdomains aren't the answer for every website, but I feel there are at least 500 thousand or so sites with their own domain names, which would for the reasons above, be better served by a subdomain of the parent company's/organization's domain name.
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