Here's a crazy story this morning -- from no less a source than DomainNameNews, which is where Schutze and I used to work in the late 1970s. Apparently, the folks who own the domain name Cowboys.com -- which is a "boot barn," no less -- were all ready to sell the moniker to Your Dallas Cowboys for $275,000 during some kind of a domain-name auction in Hollywood, Florida. Only, Your Dallas Cowboys thought they were buying the name for $275 -- because that sounds right, right? So now it's back on the market.
Notes the owner of the auction site: "You can’t take your family to a football game for $275!!!" Fair enough. --Robert Wilonsky
For those who may need some help…follow this logic:
The Cowboys brand is huge. Everytime a fan watches a Cowboys press conference on ESPN, NFL Channel, local news broadcasts, etc., they see a backdrop with DallasCowboys.com on it.
The trademark rights of the Cowboys disallows a owner of the cowboys.com domain from publishing a site promoting anything related to football. If a fan happens to enter cowboys.com and sees a rodeo site (as has been the case for many years), they simply think to type dallascowboys.com…and like that, they find DallasCowboys.com…bookmark and it’s a wrap.
Why exactly should the Cowboys pay $250k for a domain when they’ve already spent all these years marketing dallascowboys.com and making it the most visited website of any in the NFL (according to media metrix)? Sure, owning cowboys.com is a “nice-to-have”, but it hardly necessitates a $250k cash payment. Those who think it is a good idea for the Cowboys to pay anything substantial for this domain are smoking or have no clue about the business landscape of the Dallas Cowboys. They don’t have the same marketing and branding issues faced by most companies…
Posted at: October 18, 2007 3:05 PM