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Mainstream Thinks Dot XXX is a Bust

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Dot XXXAn op-ed piece was written on Mashable about the new dot XXX domain. It was a criticism piece about dot XXX being an irrelevant domain and that main stream people will only be buying it to prevent pornographers from using their trademark.

The author was ignoring the first non-adult trademark to purchase a .XXX with their own uses in mind..PETA. PETA was one of the first companies to buy a .XXX and they have every intention of using the site for their own marketing purposes. Since many people think that their ads are verging on pornographic anyway, it will be interesting to see what they do with their new domain.

The writer continued to criticize the adult industry and their history of domain names, saying that most of our traffic is based off of accidental web stumbles instead of specific searches, SEO and all the other traditional means of driving traffic to a site. He used the example of Whitehouse.com being an adult site and not a site for the White House. In that case, yes accidental traffic was the primary source. Of course the domain also gained a big reputation because it is not the White House and people liked the humor of it.  In this case the criticism  was more that someone was quick enough to buy that hot domain real estate and figure out a way to monetize it in a big way.

He also used Whitehouse.com as an example of a site not being what is appears to be.  According to this logic, your business URL and name needs to be reflective of exactly what you do. So if you make wool scarves, you better call your business Wool Scarves Inc and have the domain be woolscarves.com. Because branding like “Warm Sheep” is misleading. I think the marketing world on a whole would have a huge issue with this logic.

Is he right that most mainstream businesses will buy a .XXX domain to prevent someone else from using it? Yes. Of course that is why they also bought .net, .me, .com, .co, .info, .cc ….you get my point.  If your business is trademarked and branded you want to make sure that you are capturing every possible source of traffic. You don’t want someone else benefiting from your brands hard work. Is .XXX any different? No.

So will there be some mainstream .XXX that is actually used? Yes. Will some be parked? Yes. Does it mean that .XXX is a failure? ….no.