Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com(techcrunch.com) |
Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com(techcrunch.com) |
Second, it's actually quite possible Dropbox asked the .com holders to forward traffic to the real site in order for both parties to value the domain's contribution to downloads/upsales from type-in traffic (is it 90% new users? Or almost always those who have an account?). This would mean TechCrunch hurts Dropbox by increasing their cost to buy/license the domain.
Third, we can't tell who owns the domain, so it could still be the same party! The .com could forward to the real site for just one day to tease Dropbox by sending it visitors for just one day. This also means they could point to the real site for a month, then a competitor later on after links start rolling in.
Finally, I don't think this owner, nor Justintv.com, are cybersquatters since they owned their domains since the 90's.
"21. Plaintiff has expended considerable time and effort promoting and advertising Dropbox, using DROPBOX as its brand name. To date, Plaintiff has spent in excess of $1 million dollars marketing the DROPBOX brand."
They have $1.5m in funding (according to CrunchBase), and they've spent over a million dollars on marketing already? There has to be an interesting story in there somewhere.
In addition, depending on the definition of 'marketing' (IANAL), the referral engine (i.e. free space for referring other users), might count as marketing the dropbox brand, and the 'value' of the free space would likely count as the amount customers would have to pay, not the cost to dropbox.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://dropbox.com
which doesn't show too much except for some godaddy.com domain parking.
If it was just a domain parked while the guy was trying to figure out what he wanted to do with it, I'm not so excited about the outcome. If it was misleading site pretending to be getdropbox.com, then that's a whole other story.
There really needs to be a better system for domain name registration. I'm all for inexpensive domain names but perhaps there should be some sort of waiting list, and if people are on the waiting list, the renewal fees get raised by a set amount each year (perhaps capped at something like 25%) as long as there was a waiting list. Once the person doesn't renew, the first person on the waiting list gets it but they get charged at the new rate.
In that way, you couldn't just squat on a domain without doing something with it and eventually there would be a fair market price for it. If no one wanted it, the price for the domain would stay low.
There is probably still some gaming in a system like that but at least it would encourage more turnover of unused domains, which would be a good thing.
That said, it's excellent that they get the domain that they deserve, which will undoubtedly increase traffic and profit for the company.
Feels weird being exhorted to "Get Dropbox" when I already using one...
From the PDF in the link, it sounds like the original owner then transferred the domain to a third party, who then ran ads for Dropbox's competitors, leading to the legal wrangling.
note that I don't like squatters either, but who can tell that he wasn't legitimate when he registered it first?
Google is much more trustworthy than DNS -- it's essentially content-addressed.
after looking in the server logs and finding nothing strange that would explain why the survey is only occasionally not working (i still didn't have a concrete definition of what "not working" meant), i had the company talk to one of their customers to get more information. he forwarded me the feedback email generated from their website, which included the end user's ip, which i then looked in the logs for.
what i found was that the way the user got to the company's feedback page was by typing "www.theirdomain.com" into yahoo search, clicking on the first result, and then going to the feedback link from their site (the referrer of their initial visit was a search.yahoo.com query for the domain). only after typing "www.theirdomain.com/survey" into yahoo's search box, did i discover the root of the problem.
for whatever reason, yahoo wasn't returning any results for the specific "www.theirdomain.com/survey" query, despite the page being there for years and having proof of yahoo crawling the url many times in the logs. google would bring it up as the first result, as did every other search engine, but for some reason yahoo would just return a "couldn't find anything matching that" error, which the end user translated into "your company's survey page doesn't work". after telling the specific user to type the survey url into the box "at the top of the screen", it of course worked. every other customer complaining about the problem was doing the same thing, all because of yahoo.
Asking a user what the address in the address box/bar is often ends with a blank expression on their face!
Chuck Norris is the 3rd item!
If you are unsure of the domain name, Google is definitely the more trustworthy option.
That way, I get an extra layer of protection of scams and what-nots. Well worth the extra click or two.