Dot cons


Great-sounding domain names rarely make for powerful online brands, suggests Barnaby Page


O


nline gaming is primarily about marketing: not just in the crude form of bringing new customers to your site, but also in the subtler sense of creating a positive


experience, along with a brand they will remember so that they return.


Anyone with deep enough pockets (and, okay,


friendly enough regulators) can put in place the technology to offer e-gambling, and the limited number of basic casino games that exist means that there are only so many changes you can ring on gameplay: Blackjack is, fundamentally, Blackjack whichever site the consumer plays it on.


So it’s the brand experience and the brand image that are key. With this in mind, it’s at first not surprising to see that Jersey-based Search Focus expects to raise $10m from the sale of the Gambling.com domain name, which it has put up for sale through the domain marketplace Sedo.


It’s a great name, you might think – imagine


owning the generic term for the whole sector! And imagine what you might make when you sell it on, too…this writer will go to his deathbed regretting that despite being one of the very earliest commentators on the Internet and all that, he didn’t have the foresight to register Sex.com.


But in reality, making cash from selling it on


to someone else naïve enough to believe that a generic name spells success for a Web venture is probably the only way you would profit from Gambling.com.


Look at the top names on Alexa Internet’s rankings of the most-visited Websites (estimates


32 FEBRUARY 2011


by their nature, but widely held to be pretty accurate ones) and you’ll see names like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo!, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, as well as a handful – just a handful – of offline brands, mostly media and tech outfits like Apple and the BBC, and an even smaller of “it does what it says on the tin” names like IMDB (The Internet Movie Database).


What you won’t see much of is the generics. The highest scorer is Live.com, but that’s used by Microsoft to promote Windows Live, so it’s really doing duty as a brand rather than a common word. Tellingly, News.com redirects to CNET (at number 76 in the Alexa list) – clearly the marketers there felt that for branding purposes, as well as for intellectual- property reasons, something made-up and distinctive was preferable to a term most of us utter every day.


Another interesting twist on the branding of online gaming comes from Ask Jeeves


And you’ll have to go a lot further down to find Cars.com (number 1976), Sex.com (25,484) or Insurance.com (in the second hundred thousand), all mentioned in their time as golden domain names.


The lesson, then, seems to be that if you can’t


or don’t want to leverage your offline brand on the Internet, it’s better to spend a fraction of $10m paying a decent naming consultancy to come up with a good new name than to buy Gambling.com.


Your Bingo, sir...


Another interesting twist on the branding of online gaming comes from Ask Jeeves, the UK incarnation of Ask.com (Alexa’s number 51). Launched as a search engine in 1996, it managed to survive the dotcom crash but never exactly set the search world alight, and has at last succumbed to the all-slaying might of Google. At the end of last year, it repositioned itself as a question-and-answer service, putting a new face on search by trying to supply accurate direct answers to questions rather than simply pointing you toward pages where they might or might not be found. Now, rather surprisingly, it is also branching


out into Bingo – a diversification that on the surface is about as organic as Twitter opening a fried-chicken chain. (You read it here first…) But there’s a smart idea here. Featuring both


free and real play live Bingo games, the site “was created in response to the high number of questions which Ask Jeeves receives about Bingo”, the company says. The business model seems to be that among the 360,000 questions received daily by Ask Jeeves, enough are along the lines of “where can I play Bingo?” to justify establishing a new operation that not only answers that query but also monetises the visitor (always the tough proposition for the lesser search engines). And it’s branded AskBingo.co.uk. Of course,


“ask Bingo” doesn’t make any kind of sense, but that’s not the point – the important thing is that the trusted online Ask brand is being extended to lend credibility to the Bingo offering. As gaming on the Internet grows even bigger this is something I suspect we’ll see a lot more of, and partnering with an established online operator from outside the gaming sector could be another approach for land-based casinos pondering the branding dilemma.


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