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Oscar winners show desire for .movie
Kevin Murphy,
March 8, 2010, 12:26:10 (UTC),
Domain Registries
As a bit of a film buff, I’ve always thought the case for a .movie gTLD was a slam-dunk.
I’d really rather see movie posters containing URLs like sherlock.movie rather than sherlock-holmes-movie.warnerbros.com.
I thought I’d figure out how many of last night’s Oscar nominees managed to secure movietitle.tld for their official web sites and how many went for other options.
I managed to locate domains for almost all of the nominees, 50 in total. Only one or two short films didn’t appear to have easily-found official web sites.
Here are my quick-and-dirty findings:
- Only 26% of nominees had domains that were variations on moviename.tld. Examples include whichwayhome.net, lovelybones.com and intheloop.co.uk
- 48% of nominated films had domains including suffixes such as movie or -movie, taking the format thehurtlocker-movie.com or avatarmovie.com or brightstarthemovie.com
- 28% of nominees had no dedicated domain, instead using third-level domains such as sherlock-holmes-movie.warnerbros.com or URLs with the movie name after the slash, such as disney.go.com/disneypictures/UP/
Only one official site – whichwayhome.net – was registered in a gTLD other than .com. One French film and one UK film were found under their home ccTLD.
Some movies could easily have picked up a .net (hurtlocker.net, for example, was registered after the movie was already in the can). Movie marketers clearly demand .com addresses, even if they have to awkwardly lever -movie into the domain.
Some films actually own moviename.tld, but redirect visitors to moviename-movie.com regardless. For example, asingleman.com bounced me to asingleman-movie.com and Whois shows the domain has not been transferred since its creation.
I think this all shows that there’s demand for commercially brandable movie domains in a TLD that resonates as much as .com, and that the string “movie” is desirable.
TBH that only speaks for crappy domain registration procedures (which we know are very common), not that the film industry is interested in a dedicated TLD. Unfortunately a lot of new TLD applicants make the same assumptions on expected demand for their domain based on misleading grounds
That’s definitely possible, Francesco.
I’m also wondering if having the word “movie” in the URL is useful for SEO purposes, particularly when the film title is made up of common generic terms.
My experience is that in most cases that is actually pure incompetence 😉
Regardless of demand from marketers, I’m not convinced there’s a massive business opportunity there.
Under a strict definition of “movie”, something with a cinematic release in the English language, you’d be lucky to get a couple thousand new registrations per year.