Domains are still very important for a number of reasons (prestige being an obvious one). Buying the domains before announcing the round of funding probably saved them a good deal of money too.
It's a drop in the bucket if you look at the big picture.
Facebook paid $200k for their domain a few years ago. Imagine what they would have to shell out now had they decided against it back then.
Facebook paid $200k for their domain a few years ago. Imagine what they would have to shell out now had they decided against it back then.
-------
What you fail to mention is that they got by on thefacebook.com for a while before they ponied up and got the current domain ... at that point it was clear they were going to be huge so it didn't matter.
Spending $500k on a domain out the gate instead of getting 5 badass developers working on making your product rock, is stupid to me, but thats just me.
"Spending $500k on a domain out the gate instead of getting 5 badass developers working on making your product rock, is stupid to me, but thats just me."
They have $40.5 Million left for developers and if need be can raise even more. The question is: would 5 more developers make a difference?
Putting aside the point of whether or not it was actually prudent to buy the domain, you take on an attitude that suggests that saving the $500k would have led to a better product. With $41M at hand, I'm not sure that's the case.
There's nothing silly about it. Domains are important but for brandable terms. Color is far too common a word. It conveys nothing that could be seen as a brand.
Further, it shows that they're spending with the notion of huge scale long before there's any sign that's necessary. (It's what sunk a lot of dot bomb companies.) Yes it might be cheaper now, but it's a risky way to spend their money especially when a brandable term is both more valuable and less expensive.
I think what he means is silly is that the post only focuses on the $1/2M spent on the domains vs the amount of expectation the company had pre-launch.
With $41M, color has more than enough cash to pivot onto something that will work - but for me the real reason color hit a big fail at launch was the same reason cuil was - the level of expectation people had about the company due to the fact they raised so much/had so much hype. If color had a different name, and was written by a small hardy team from y combinator or whatever, I think people who have still had some scepticism but would have been generally positive.
I, like a lot of people, looked at that app and thought, "this is $41M of development?".
They can still pivot and do something interesting, but I think this is one of those times that "release early, release often" does not apply. It's a great app for when your at a big event, but as I asked on twitter, what if there is no there, there?
When do people ever say, "I bought an Apple computer"? People usually say, "I bought a Mac". Ever rarer will you see someone say, "I bought an Apple phone." (I'm talking about most laymen aka consumers)
Apple's branding value has followed from their high quality and consumer-accessible products. No amount of marketing will support a crappy product. Focusing on marketing over quality is how products die a spectacular death. Remember Kin?
Mac bought the domain "me.com" which is awful. I love my .mac email address and never use ".me" for anything. Especially because it used to belong to a failed social networking site and so is blocked at a bunch of the (govt) sites that I work!
Here's the thing, the domains of most successful websites are somewhat informative about the service that the website provides. It doesn't matter how abstract or strange the name may seem. For example, look at sites/services like Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Netflix, Mint, and Yelp. All of those sites have names can be derived from their purpose. How about Color? That name is totally ambiguous and thus loses effectiveness.
What if Facebook was named "friends.com"? Sure, it probably would have been cool to have such a simple domain name, but Facebook is more effective because the name signals purpose.
In short, it's not only about the "prestige" in a name, it's about what that name signals. Color signals nothing.
Agreed. I do think domain names are valuable. However, they could have spent their money better. Probably less money too. The name color doesn't evoke anything to the purpose. I would have gone with something that speaks to social interaction and capturing moments. Catchit, lifeline, keeple, or something similar. -Keeple is pretty awesome, actually. :)
The whole point is that the rest of them have built a recognizable brand. You can do that with an offbeat word like yelp relatively easily, but they'll never do it with color.
The cynic in me theorizes that "color" is a term perfectly targeted to the company's real customers, advertisers, as it implies a deep store of data on the targets of advertisements. The "color" is that which has been added to potential ad viewers' demographic profiles through use of the service.
This. I don't understand why everyone thinks the price for color.com was too high. We paid quite a bit more than that for our domain names, so I do have a point of reference here.
I personally believe this was a horrible investment in a horrible product with a horrible idea, but to rip on the domain name purchase really seems like the least of all possible concerns.
It looks like from your profile that your domains were for a purchasable consumer good, I still think $500k is expensive for that, but given how much juice Google gives to owning the domain, probably a pretty wise investment. You didn't have a choice about what people would search for, if I want a necktie, I'm going to search for "necktie".
No one is going to search for Color and find a photo app, they are going to search for the name of whatever the cool app people are talking about is, so for quick, cheap SEO they would have been better off calling it MonkeySponge or something.
> I personally believe this was a horrible investment in a horrible product with a horrible idea, but to rip on the domain name purchase really seems like the least of all possible concerns.
The whole point of the post was "The domain name fiasco is the indicator of a much bigger and deeper problem"
Domains are still very important for a number of reasons (prestige being an obvious one). Buying the domains before announcing the round of funding probably saved them a good deal of money too.
It's a drop in the bucket if you look at the big picture.
Facebook paid $200k for their domain a few years ago. Imagine what they would have to shell out now had they decided against it back then.