From PR to Eternity

Last month Pizza.com sold for a staggering $2.6million. That’s one pricy pizza and one dear domain name. It shows just how much companies value domain names. But are they right to do so? Are domain names really that valuable? Is Pizza.com really worth the sames as 69 Lexus RX series sedans?

It’s generally agreed that domain names should be short, memorable and easy to spell. That’s why you don’t see many websites like Order-A-Pizza-Online-And-Get-It-Delivered-To-Your-Door.com or 15inchPizzaIn15minutes.com.

Domain names that are short, memorable and easy to spell, like Pizza.com have therefore become very valuable commodities. But is this all about to change? Are the days of domain names selling for millions coming to an end?

Is the domain name dead?

I’ve noticed a trend recently in the Guardian and on websites such as Twitter, for domain names to be replaced by TinyUrl’s. This is perhaps most prolific on Twitter, where nearly 40% of users use the service to share links, yet have only 140 characters to do so.

For those of you who don’t know, TinyUrl is a website that turns big and nasty domain names like this – http://www.m-p-w.co.uk/2008/05/green-light-for-virtualisation.html in to small and friendly ones, like this one for my last post – http://tinyurl.com/3vcj8v. It’s sort of like txt spk for domain names.

We are becoming more accustomed to clicking on short links that we probably can’t remember or need to remember, yet alone spell. But despite this companies spend millions to get us to remember their web addresses. But is it worth it when their links may just be converted into TinyUrl’s or found through search engines anyway? I know so many people that google websites such as You Tube instead of typing youtube.com into their browser. I’d love to see some research into how people actually find websites. Do the majority of web users type the web address or use a search engine? I’d put my money on a search engine.

If the of rise of the TinyUrl continues will we see all websites linked to via their TinyUrl address or their existing url? Or will the two co-exist with companies, journalists and web users using whichever is shorter?

I think the latter, although I think the TinyUrl will have to be significantly shorter. For example http://tinyurl.com/3yc3wc is shorter than http://www.guardian.co.uk/media but only by 6 characters, and that is including all the w’s. So is shortening it really worth it? I don’t think so.