To Be BBC.com or Not To Be BBC.com
There has been a minor stir in The Register and at Revolution about the fact that following an FOI request the BBC has admitted that it spent £212,000 on transferring the bbc.com domain from Boston Business Computing to the corporation back in 1999.
It sounds like an awful lot of money - but then you have to bear in mind that back in 1999 a business plan consisting of "we've registered a wacky domain name, and are going to do something with it on the interweb" could make you make a millionaire (on paper at least) overnight.
The thing I've found funny is the definition of "not using" the domain name.
The Register states:
But in the six years since acquiring the domain what exactly has the Beeb done with the domain? Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
It even quotes the BBC as saying it:
has not exploited bbc.com to date
Well fair point if you are saying that the BBC hasn't created a different portal to BBC web content on .com from the one on .co.uk, but I would vigourously contest the idea that the domain name isn't being used. BBC.com is in fact on average the third biggest referring URL to the BBC homepage - only one of the leading search engines and our own News site send more traffic to the bbc.co.uk front door than people bookmarking or typing in bbc.com into their address bar. With that in mind, it probably seems useful for the BBC to own it.
I thought this showed a bizarre lack of understanding from The Register. That domain had to be bought, end of story, and the earlier the better. 200k was hardly extortionate.
ABSOLUTELY! I was so cross reading the pathetic story about this in this morning's Metro that I nearly choked on my croissant. Critics, they said, complain that the Beeb has done nothing with it except alias it to bbc.co.uk. Well, duh! Most of the world likes to type somesite+ctrl+enter into IE and have it find www.somesite.com - most of the world doesn't know or care about .co.uk domains but DOES know what the BBC is.
They should seek out the person who decided to spend the 220K or whatever, and congratulate them on spending a sensible sum protecting the BBCs trademark and improving access, and give them a coffee, a bun, and a modest cash bonus.
Anything else - the views of the "critics" the Metro so coyly didn't ID - is hopeless, twattish, Little Englanderness. It's a no-brainer which could only be controversial to people who have utterly failed to understand any of the issues.
GAH!
Thanks, I feel better now.
:)
I can understand though that to an average license-fee payer, 'our' BBC paying £200,000 for seven letters and a couple of dots to be extreme and a waste of money, especially as nothing unique has been done with it since (although Martin, you may be able to clear this up, didn't the BBC have a plan for the .com domain, separate from the .co.uk one but the idea got canned?) You can argue the case in both ways - today I guess even a novice user wouldn't fall apart if they visited BBC.com and found Boston Business Computing. They'd just go off to Google and soon find the proper Beeb site. Still, there's far worse ways money has been spent!
And Martin, a great site. I stumbled across it thanks to Google's Blog Search the other week and have been reading ever since. It's fascinating to have a behind the scenes look at just how much goes into the Web site!