In the boom days of the Internet, a million domain names a day were registered, and most of them have disappeared along with the get-rich-quick dreamers. The real question now is the fate of the remaining millions of business domain names in active use on global e-commerce today.

From its inception, when the genius founders doodled on a napkin and came up with the big five suffixes: .com, .net, .gov, .edu, .mil, and .org, and declared “www” as the one and only key to cyberspace, business was changed forever. This weird and strange thing called a domain name costing pennies in comparison to a trademark registration, was often left to Webmasters or junior staff to play with.

Today, if a domain name issue is not being dealt with at the senior boardroom level, then behold the quick demise of that corporation; from marketing to branding and just about everything else it does.

A URL (universal resource locator) is the only key that opens the gate to a corporation, its products, images and identities. There is no other bypass to the URL to access a Website.

Websites have just completed a full circle of a hard struggle, and somehow survived where other traditional marketing tools such as old-fashioned print-driven advertising and branding have taken the back seat, and the marketing and survival strategies for these new cyber-branding issues are all on the forefront.

Now the same sites and domain names must face harsher realities once again, all to ensure high visibility and the exposure they provide. Today without visibility, on e-commerce, websites are simply doomed.

While billions of Web pages are poised for the right match between service providers and customers, e-commerce is turning into a flood. Customers all over the world are only amused as they watch the Websites struggle to gain attention. Their mysterious behavior on search engines and the role of alpha-structures of each and every domain name is now a very big question.

Published: June 4, 2004

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