TechCrunch.com broke the news today that Google owned YouTube.com is helping to launch a new channel with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR).
The name they picked out for the project is “I Files”.
Like CNN’s ireport, ifiles looks like its going to be driven by consumer reporting.
The domain name ifiles.com is a huge Torrent search engine site where people search for and find copyrighted material to view and download.
Even worse YouTube’s ifiles is being partially funded by an $800,000 grant from the Knight Foundation.
As CNN.com found out after releasing its iReport product, a lot of people will assume the company owns the matching .com and go to the matching .com site for more information. You will recall, CNN went out and purchased ireport.com for $750,000 after launching its iReport product as thousands of people where going to ireport.com each day looking for CNN’s product.
You can expect a lot of people to wind up and typing in ifiles.com into their browser once the service gets popular and I’m pretty sure neither Google nor the Knight Foundation will be real happy with what surfers will find there or the fact that its the choice of the product name that will cause ultimately in more copyrighted material to be viewed and downloaded.
Currently ifiles.com has a Google Page Rank of 3 and an Alexa rank of 206K.
We will keep our eye on it and see how much additional traffic the torrent search engine gets in the months ahead.
Another example of a huge company failing to consider all ramifications in the selection of a product name.
Hat Tip to Sean Sullivan
Ouch!
Clearly foolish, basic common senses marketing dictates to buy premium domains before announcing or starting any project at all, and if you name it with a non premium expression that is a worse mistake, my slogan for buydomains.com was and is “Business Starts Here” (with super premium .Com domains) Our first slogan was “kick butt take names” 🙂 And they still use our target logo, signifying to nail the domain first.
Fortunately we are finally finding occasional common sense in UDRP processes at least.
iFiles.com?
the next big sale in domain names
ifiles.youtube
And we’ll seldom use keyboards.
FB has bought and now uses FacebookStories.com
how do you know they bought the domain and didn’t get it handed to them under threat of a UDRP?