Webfly blog

Edgeworks White Paper: Bidding on Brand Names

Now the dust has settled on Google’s Trademark changes, it’s time to look seriously at how bidding on brands and brand names could help you drive traffic to your website.

So, to fill in the gaps and help you make sense of the outrageous amount of info out there, we’ve put together a comprehensive White Paper on how best to add bidding on brands to your SEO strategy.

The White Paper covers:

• What is – and what isn’t - a brand name
• Why people bid on brand names
• How does bidding work
• Google Trademark Policy Change
• Why should I bid on brand names
• What names and words should I bid on

Plus it’s free – so go and listen to it, watch it or and download the hard copy right now! Yes….NOW!!!

ICANN & The Great Domain Name Gold Rush

Much like the diverse effect the Californian Gold Rush had on the lives of millions of people, yesterday’s announcement by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) could go one of two ways:

·    Change the Internet into a bright shiny new world
or
·    Degenerate into a horrible mess 

But before we step into this, a bit of background. ICANN is the organisation that, essentially, controls what we name our websites. They ‘invented’ domain names – ie ‘.com’ & ‘.info’ & ‘.co.uk’. They also accredit and police the people who sell us our domain names – the registrars or domain name registration companies.

Yesterday, ICANN agreed to relax the rules on what constitutes a bona fide generic top-level domain name (gTLD). Well, in fact, they ripped up the rulebook, and flushed it down the toilet just for good measure. From early next year we will all be able to invent our own domain names and apply to have them registered – so we could have: call.edgeworks; BA could have: areoplanes.fly; Barclays could have: great.bank; Sony could have: psp.games, etc etc.

Sounds good? Yes and no. Yes, it will mean that for a paltry sum not less than £50,000 (& probably more like £150k) you too could buy: www.johnsmith.electricals or www.Ilove.hamsters but it also means that someone else could try to buy the above – even if it’s your product or brand. That’s a concern for corporates with multiple brands or businesses channels. It will get very, very expensive to start buying up the whole set.

But possibly the most worrying part of all this stems from a practice called ‘cybersquatting’ which is buying a high profile domain name and then sitting on it until someone pays you a very large sum of money to release it to them.

While ICANN say this won’t happen - and there are ways of legally disputing the ownership of trademarked words if you can pin down where your squatter actually is in the world. It’s highly likely that cybersquatting will be making a very big come-back. Think about it. The world is full of millions of words in hundreds of different languages and dialects. How can you or I or ICANN decide what words, in what order, might be valuable and to whom? Hence, the Gold Rush phenomenon. Where there’s even a hint of a fortune to be made, there’s no stopping the human race.