General News
[Edition 34] LOS ANGELES, Wednesday: Companies have denied that they are being affected by cyber squatters and the diminishing number of domain names. At the launch of the site’s advertising campaign, the web designer for www.columbiatristar.com denied that they had been forced to adopt a stupidly long web address.
“This is exactly the web address we wanted. I mean who would just look up columbia.com to find us? Only idiots.”
Columbia and other movie houses have been especially affected by cybersquatters who often take the names of their movies before they have the chance. Until recently they have got around the problem by adding “themovie” and other such identifiers to the names such as www.americanbeautymovie.com. Unfortunately, cyber-squatters have picked up on this trend and are forcing movie companies to adopt ever more confusing web domains.
Despite this the director of Geoffrey Rush’s new movie, Quills, claimed that he couldn’t be happier with their website name despite some initial problems with cyber squatters.
“Initially it may not have been my favourite choice, but I really wouldn’t change the address now,” said ….. “I think there is a real ring to www.youknowthemovieaboutthatguywhosadismisnamedafter-wellanywayitsgotkatewinsletnudeinit.com.”
The producers of the site say that the name has also meant that they have been able to do away with a lot of the text in the site, which was previously needed to introduce the stars and describe the plot.
Outside the movie industry the effect of cyber-squatters can also be seen as corporations struggle to come up with original names for their companies which correspond with remaining webnames. Despite the difficulty, the owners of Cash Counters, a new startup accountancy firm, are pleased with their new website.
“Surely people would try www.cashcountersptyltd_accountants.com within their first several attempts to guess our name,” said MD Chris Murphy. “That’s about as close as you can get these days.”
Murphy says that he was glad he had chosen to put in “PtyLtd” at the end of his web address, which he said he much preferred to “making up some bullshit name like ‘Accenture'”.
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