One aspect of domaining that is a risk is acquiring a domain that obviously only one organization can benefit from. It’s a risk sometimes you win sometimes you lose. Recently the Cowboys.com is back on sale.
Many in domaining claim it’s a great loss of the Dallas Cowboys by not buying the domain on the aftermarket. I look at this from a marketing point of view. If the team owned some abstract domain such as Dallas-Cowboys.us or CowboysOfficial.com I would understand domainer’s logic. What I’ve never seen in any domain article is the fact that they own DallasCowboys.com. The domain is over 13 years old.
I saw the comment on Elliot’s blog that if a user goes to Cowboys.com looking for tickets the stadium the team would loose money. They wouldn’t see ticket info & go to Ticketmaster instead. How many of you buy your tickets by guessing the URL of the sports team? Do you buy concert tickets by typing in the singer’s name & putting dot com at the end? No you don’t. You might look for generic information this way but you don’t purchase this way. Now Elliot is great writer & I like reading his blog but comments like this are too common in the domaining world. Actually ticket transactions on DallasCowboys.com are redirected to Ticket master anyway.
I think that if more articles just wrote about what companies have already as a URL they realize some buys are unnecessary. Dallas has a great domain that matches their brand. There are plenty of companies with horrible domains that could use generic domains to support their business. The Dallas Cowboys isn’t in that boat. The economy in the US is bad guys. Changing their domain may even do more damage short term than good.
Purchasing a highly competitive keyword that brings plenty of business’ sales or leads, that’s a great domain no matter what the language.