Comments on: Why Topix.net Should Have Saved its $1 Million

By: سيدات

سيدات — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 04:22:10 +0000

In some cases, editors will be drawn from the pool of active contributors

By: Bernard

Bernard — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 21:22:16 +0000

I normally just moderate spam comments to my company's news blog in bulk without looking at them very closely. But today, I only had a couple in the queue. One of them was linking back to topix.net (deep link, not home page). I guess 10,000 links in the ODP isn't enough.

By: Andy Beal

Andy Beal — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:41:48 +0000

Lots of good points. It’s easy to question Topix’s motives without knowing all the details. I certainly hope they explored all options.

By: Rob Garner

Rob Garner — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:34:10 +0000

Andy – In addition to your point about value of the lost traffic driven inadvertantly to the .com name, the acquisition allows Topix.net to just become “Topix”, which is a much stronger brand than either “topix.net” or “topix.com”. It seems that they had no other choice but to brand as “.net” because of the potential dotcom confusion.

If they are rebranding as “Topix”, then 301′ing .com to .net would likely suffice. But the WSJ article also mentioned that they perceive dotcom as more being a more trusted TLD in their readers eyes. So maybe they are going for more trust in the SERP’s with the dotcom, even at the risk of losing traffic in the short term. It would be interesting if someone at Topix would chime in – I’d like to know more about their branding strategy.

By: Simon Heseltine

Simon Heseltine — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:21:35 +0000

Yep, we have a property that we had to go with the .net on because the .com was held but not used by another company. We inquired about it before we started the .net and were told 30k, decided against it, launched the .net, went back and the price had almost doubled, so we decided that the .net would work just fine. It would be nice for us to have the .com, especially since we have the term trademarked, so we’ll see in the future, although what would probably force our hand would be them putting up a competing product (not to give them ideas)…

By: Nathan Weinberg

Nathan Weinberg — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:09:50 +0000

Yeah, I was going to point out that del.icio.us had the foresight to eventually purchase delicious.com, but the brains to redirect that to del.icio.us, and not the other way around.

By: Broc

Broc — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 05:10:08 +0000

yeah
i think in todays growing world of internet familiarity using anything but a .com domain simply requires you to incorporate the tld into your brand to prevent whatever loss may have come of this a couple years ago

By: Jonix

Jonix — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 01:55:13 +0000

I agree too, they should redirect the .com domain to the .net domain, it’s the best solution. Also they should get the topix.org domain and also redirect to the .net.

By: Marshall Sponder

Marshall Sponder — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 01:13:24 +0000

Whatever the motivation for changing domain name, as long as it’s legit, Search Engines should do more to help businesses ensure they don’t “drop out” of search indexes or otherwise suffer.

It seems to me, we should respect Topix’s reason for wanting the domain change. Search Engines are now a major part of most business and revenue plans – maybe it’s time to offer professional services from the engines to ensure changes go right.

By: Jarid

Jarid — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:41:00 +0000

While the re-branding might be dangerous, the fact that they’ve spent money branding Topix.net is a moot point as it’s a sunk cost. It’s a question of what is the right decision for the long-term. Also, I would argue Del.icio.us is far from the mainstream. Heck, they even own Delicious.com for these very same reasons…

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:46:12 +0000

After 10 years I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job of branding Xenite.Org but I still wish I had taken Xenite.Com.

It’s the type of quandry you have to live through to understand.

By: Andy Beal

Andy Beal — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:18:02 +0000

Amy – yeah, a 301 redirect (at the server level) would do the trick. I wouldn’t trust the domain registrar to do it though. For example, GoDaddy offers a service, but it uses a 302 redirect.

By: Amy Cham

Amy Cham — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:06:00 +0000

I was snarking about this article with some classmates earlier today…if I understood correctly, it sounds like they tried to fix the issues with a meta forward? Yikes.IP

Maybe I’m missing something in this, but don’t most registrars offer domain mapping that can resolve multiple domains to the same place? So they could just map the .com to the same server as the .net and not risk losing their indexing and backlinks?

It sounds like Topix.net has been working fine for them anyway…

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 18:28:24 +0000

It would be interesting seeing how much type in traffic they were losing. That is most likely the justification, and the original domain owner could use that as effective leverage.

I am not sure they would lose so much traffic on the redirect to a dot com, as it would depend on how various databases are being updated on Google’s end. 301 to dot net is the obvious way to reduce short term losses, but if you make a $1M investment in something, a hit for a couple of weeks in income is probably bearable too (if it really happened)

By: Sergey Petrov

Sergey Petrov — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 18:18:37 +0000

Oops! Sorry, I’m not the only smart guy in the club … )

By: Sergey Petrov

Sergey Petrov — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 18:17:23 +0000

All they need is to spend $1 more for .com redirection to .net

By: Andy Beal

Andy Beal — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 17:51:13 +0000

I agree, they should just redirect the .com to the .net and not worry.

By: Joshua Steimle

Joshua Steimle — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 17:42:14 +0000

A lot of companies seem to still be getting a handle on the idea that people don’t type in domain names to get to a website so much as they click on a link in a search engine, and in a search engine the domain could be long, short, or have an obscure TLD and it doesn’t matter one bit. Of course it doesn’t hurt to have the .com extension, since it’s what most people type in because they forget when site is actually .net, but it seems they haven’t done the research to verify whether that was worth $1M.

As for changing the name, why bother? Just put up a one-page site at Topix.com that says “We’re actually Topix.net, jerk.” and have a link for people to click on. No redirect issues, and the .net will be that much further ingrained in the public consciousness, adding to the already substantial investment.

By: Jordan McCollum

Jordan McCollum — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 17:03:44 +0000

I agree. Perhaps a wiser move would be to 301 Topix.com to Topix.net. 301s aside, like you say, they’ve built a brand around .net.