uTube.com and Compromising Your Brand Integrity
Back in November 2006, uTube.com (Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation) sued YouTube, demanding that the popular video-sharing site stop using the similar 'sounding' name. What's more interesting is how the first company's site tried and is still trying to leverage the popularity of the latter to make money (all the while compromising their own integrity).
uTube.com is an Ohio-based company that sells used tube, pipe, and rollform machinery. Around last October-November, the company's site got massive amounts of traffic from people typing uTube.com instead of youtube.com while searching for the video-streaming site.
If you look at an old version of uTube.com, and compare it to the site as it exists today, you will see one notable difference. The company (which incidentally sells machinery worth upwards of $400,000) has essentially started acting like a typosquatter. They have added a spam-powered search engine at the top of the site, followed by some spammy advertisements, hoping to make some quick money from people who stumble on to their site accidentally (while looking for the other).
This unfortunate incident shows that, yes, you can make money by using tactics that are very similar to typosquatting, but raises the question: is the (probably small amount of) money worth the loss in brand integrity?
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Reader Comments (5)
- Josh P, April 17, 2007
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My guess, in this particular case, is that uTube never had a "brand" to begin with. From the start of all of this all they wanted to do was milk it for all its worth. They weren't a legitimate company from the start.
- MG Siegler, April 17, 2007
- Muhammad Saleem, April 17, 2007
- kelvin newman, April 18, 2007
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It really depends how reliant they were on the uTube brand.
I imagine they are better known by the 'universal tube' Though it would be interesting to know how much they are making though.
- E. Long, April 23, 2007
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I really don't think their target customer is searching online for this company nor do they really get a lot of inquiries for these products via their website. If anything, it's a brochure for people who have been contacted by a sales rep or someone in the field.
I would not normally be one to "pimp" a brand name like they are, but at the 1M monthly visitors they estimated to get, the revenue they make off of the typosquatting practice offsets the costs of keeping their site online for legitimate customers.
And I doubt their customers are going elsewhere due to brand confusion. If anything, it is probably a laughing point in their conversations with their customers (for the ones that even know what youtube.com is).
Working in the manufacturing industry, very few of our vendors have websites and our sourcing people are making direct contact with them anyway which is very rarely done through a website.
Their marketing and sales people have probably learned more about the Internet in the past year than they ever wished to know. Their sales team probably never projected this revenue source a few years ago!
