DL Sale: paydaylender.co.uk (300 GBP)

[websaway]

That's probably because you have somewhere between a passing interest and an obsession with domains and your mind is conditioned to think in terms of domain names. Ask a friend or a family member where they'd go to buy car insurance and I'd lay good money they'd say something like Compare the Market (their marketing is so good they may even say Compare the Meerkat) or Go Compare.

Can you name ten nationally recognised businesses that were founded on a generic domain like carinsurance.co.uk or paydayloans.co.uk, womensclothing.co.uk, alloywheels.co.uk etc..

Just to keep things in perspective. Have you any idea what compare the meercat's marketing budget has been ?

 

[websaway]

sedo sales

windscreenwipers.com £800 ( probably the price of lunch for two at board level for a large company )

English dot club $17500 ( I for one can not make an obvious case for this purchase)

This tells me that there is no norm to argue around.
But it will say different things to different people and their is an element of credibility in most opinions.

 

[websaway]

I have no idea but from the question I'm guessing that you believe that once people had seen carinsurance.co.uk it'd be there in their minds forever?

It's not simple, but if you have 50 or 100,000,000 pounds to throw at a new
brand, it doesn't really matter what you call it.

car insurance... our father's and even their father's before them would have referred to the product as such ( or motor insurance ) and therefore it has inherent recall value. What that value equates to is a moving target, we can only guess the value at any given time.
Sometimes organic deposits commodity prices are so low they are not worth taking out of the ground, other times we can't get enough of them.

 

[murph]

That's probably because you have somewhere between a passing interest and an obsession with domains and your mind is conditioned to think in terms of domain names. Ask a friend or a family member where they'd go to buy car insurance and I'd lay good money they'd say something like Compare the Market (their marketing is so good they may even say Compare the Meerkat) or Go Compare. Can you name ten nationally recognised businesses that were founded on a generic domain like carinsurance.co.uk or paydayloans.co.uk, womensclothing.co.uk, alloywheels.co.uk etc..

If the same marketing spend was applied to a premium "does what it says in the tin" domain, I suspect there would be even more traction for that niche. I think the reason there aren't too many examples of premium EMD brands is likely down to Trademark protection issues. Money dot co uk is a good example of a hugely successful brand that has yet to feature in any TV ads?

 

[Stas]

carinsurance.co.uk should be a nice business. and maybe can be a bit of a brand too. Maybe it should be a bit more serious than other brands and more straight forward/easy to use to target older generations and not so internets literate people. Don't need to remember meerkats, markets or even google
And should still win first page SEO fight.

 

[Stas]

It's for sale.

What I'm seeing on this forum is plenty of people arguing the value of a certain type of exact match domain but few who are willing to put their money where their mouth is. If this name is such a sure thing why aren't you all fighting to buy it?

From SEO point of view, to develop it, I'd want to be a big company with big adwords spend and a bit of a relationship with Google already. So it gives some power of fighting penalties, whether they are from negative SEO or from paid links (which will just be needed at some level to compete ) and power for a powerful PR campaigns

 

[websaway]

I have thousands of words in my vocabulary which combine into millions, perhaps billions of phrases many of which equate to a need. The idea that my mind would automatically associate those phrases with domains to create commercial recall is ridiculous. I like most others buy brands and luckily it's marketers rather than domainers that create them.

Perhaps you can answer the question I asked Murph. Name ten nationally recognised businesses that were founded on a generic domain like carinsurance.co.uk or paydayloans.co.uk, womensclothing.co.uk, alloywheels.co.uk etc..

It's difficult to answer your posts because you have a habit of taking the post you are replying to out of context in order to promote your argument, in saying that we may all be guilty of that to one degree or another.
If you take a post out of context, put a different slant on it and then refer to it as ridiculous then I'm afraid you can't expect an objective response and that's why a lot of these type threads sink into disrepute.

 

[Murray]

appliances online spring to mind umm

Can't think of any else, sure there probably are some though

 

[orchardapple]

Perhaps you can answer the question I asked Murph. Name ten nationally recognised businesses that were founded on a generic domain like carinsurance.co.uk or paydayloans.co.uk, womensclothing.co.uk, alloywheels.co.uk etc..

I doubt any tbh as the domains been in the hands of 'domainers' who have put unrealistic sales prices on them turning buyers away so they've looked elsewhere.

 

[Stas]

no alloywheels.co.uk but alloywheels.com is no.3 in adwords and no.1 in organic..

freebets.co.uk is doing pretty well for their exact match and they advertise on race courses, and it's shown on tv.

 

[websaway]

It's for sale.

What I'm seeing on this forum is plenty of people arguing the value of a certain type of exact match domain but few who are willing to put their money where their mouth is. If this name is such a sure thing why aren't you all fighting to buy it?

Most on this forum, if they could afford to buy it, would then not need to.
You find it difficult to retain a thread of thought, when people are referring to the term car insurance versus generic or invented brands they are mostly talking principles and fundamentals, it's general reasoning not absolutes and all discussion should be taken as such.

You can't kill someone's point by saying well if it's so good "why don't you buy it" childish really.

 

[retired_member34]

Get past that and IMO a domain like car insurance would be far more preferable to a brandable that would require additional marketing spend to make the connection between the name and the service.

This is the opposite to how most large companies, and marketing companies, view the problem.

That's probably because you have somewhere between a passing interest and an obsession with domains and your mind is conditioned to think in terms of domain names. Ask a friend or a family member where they'd go to buy car insurance and I'd lay good money they'd say something like Compare the Market (their marketing is so good they may even say Compare the Meerkat) or Go Compare.

This. We all have domain names as part of our everyday thoughts. Most members of the public don't.

Compare The Market and Money Supermarket spends tens of millions per year promoting brand recall. I think we can all agree on this. What most are missing is the money is spent on promoting brand recall, not domain name recall. You could survey the public and ask "Have you heard of Compare The Market?" and I would guess a high tens of percent would probably answer yes (they do this continuously to measure brand recall).

However, if you ask the same people, "What is the domain name for Compare The Market?" you would get 1. a large percentage not knowing what a domain name was, 2. a large percentage saying "Compare The Market", 3. those most in the know scratching their head over whether it is a comparethemarket.com or comparethemarket.co.uk. So the money is spent to ensure that whichever route the customer goes; type into a search engine or type in directly, they end up on the correct website.

Now assume someone spends the same marketing budget on carinsurance.co.uk. See the problem?


All of the above ignores the problems of protecting the brand name (look up hotels.com trademark if you are interested though) - that's another problem altogether, a problem of success. It is however a problem that big companies worry about.

 

[websaway]

So I'll take it that you can't.

You can take it as you wish, but by taking what I have said out of context you simply don't do your own thinking any good, because thinking you have proven something does not necessarily mean you have, and therefore when you delude yourself into believing you have you drift further away from any sensible objective.

 

[retired_member34]

appliances online spring to mind umm

Can't think of any else, sure there probably are some though

Appliances Online ditched their domain name, to become ao.com

 

[websaway]

I'm breaking it down to that level in order to cater to your level of intelligence.

I don't have a high level of intelligence but I do have a high degree of life experience and that's why I won't indulge in childish banter.
I'm sure you could understand this if you gave it some thought, though I suspect you won't and will respond accordingly.

 

[websaway]

Am I to read your reference to your "life experience" as you telling me how wise you are? The debate changed when you chose to take one word from my replay, twist it and use that as an excuse to make it personal rather than back-up your already fragile argument.

I bet you don't even know what my argument is.

 

[websaway]

The minute you got personal, I stopped caring.

Sorry if you thought I was being insensitive.


Just trying to be helpful, I won't respond again.

 

[Stas]

But that's the thing, the big companies have now established themselves and their brands online so why would they dilute their efforts by spending money on buying and marketing this type of domain. Money Supermarket bought a whole shed full of this type of domain for £9 million but have admitted it was a mistake and have wrote the money off.

From the point of view of a new business, if you're going to spend all the money that you suggest why not just go the traditional route and create a brand that engages with customers emotions rather than some dull exact match domain.

A company that's not into comparing car insurance yet, but has successful online brands in other niches should buy carinsurance.co.uk and develop it. I've got a feeling it can be a quick success profitwise at a fraction of a budget that gocompare, comparethemarket type domains would need before producing profit if executed correctly. I think it's instant trusted, authoritative brand in a box and definitely worth a punt for someone.
But that's the only domain I'm defending. creditcards.co.uk, paydayloans.co.uk or even mortgages.co.uk I would not be as excited about

 

[Stas]

And a brand that specialises just on car insurance and can't do other things, is not a worst thing. As a customer, I would be keen to go to such company that focuses solely car insurance and drivers, and potentially has a better offering, more insurers than brands that focus on everything.

 

[retired_member34]

appliances online spring to mind umm

This is interesting Murray, as I say as domainers we think generics have better recall than brands but most of the industry thinks the opposite. From the boss of ao.com

Despite holding an 8% share of the major domestic appliances market last year, it only has a 2% unprompted brand recall - the extent to which a brand is recognised by consumers.

Read more here , including how Comet had better recall even though it has been dead for a year.