Recent Posts
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- New gTLD in trouble as largest registrar gets suspended
- ICANN picks comms firm for new gTLDs outreach
- Donuts goes with bland, forgettable, for new company name [rant]
- Broker says it will sue after DNS abuse sting operation
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- The slow crawl to closed generics at ICANN 74
- Controversial Chinese firm among two newly revealed UNR gTLD buyers
- Over 900 people show up for ICANN 74
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- Now Sedo pulls the plug on Russians
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- Ukraine’s emotional plea to ICANN 73
- ICANN extends Covid-19 abuse monitoring to Ukraine war
- ICANN’s Ukraine relief may extend to Russians too
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- Cybersquatting cases down in .uk
- GoDaddy among five companies competing for .za contract
- Registrar hit with second porn UDRP breach notice this year
Donuts goes with bland, forgettable, for new company name [rant]
What is it with domain name companies and their terrible brands?
Donuts is now Identity Digital Inc, the company said today, with the Donuts and Afilias brands being retired.
The new name was chosen “to reflect better the commitment to helping customers find, grow and protect their authentic digital identities” the company said in a press release. I also get the vibe that the company may be expanding further outside of domains in future. Blockchain stuff, maybe?
It appears that the company has adopted a practice-what-you-preach approach to branding — it’s advocating that businesses register domains with strong keywords to the left and right of the dot, so that’s what Identity Digital will also do.
That’s fair enough, I guess.
It’s using identity.digital as its new domain, which is just as well, because the company seems to have just made itself search-proof.
If you couldn’t tell already, I don’t like the name. It strikes me as the kind of name a company might pick if it wanted to keep a low profile.
It sounds like a two-man SEO startup operating in a room above a vape shop in a northern English market town.
The name “Donuts” had been picked when the company formed in 2010 to reflect the fact that the founders were nuts about domains. Afilias was named as such because it was a joint venture of over a dozen registrars.
These were great, memorable brands!
GoDaddy, Tucows, Porkbun… all examples of strong, colorful, novel brands in the domain space. When I read about these companies, I know immediately who I’m reading about, and they don’t have any keywords in their names.
Even after 12 years writing this blog, I still have to remind myself which registrar is Name.com and which is Domain.com. Now, I’m going to be constantly reminding myself which company used to be Endurance and which used to be Donuts. Meh.
Perhaps I’m just irritated that I’m going to have to spend the next year writing “Identity Digital, formerly Donuts”.
Still, at least it’s better than “TrueName”.
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