Brownie.com Should Forward to Brownies.com

I’ll be honest with you right now. I have somewhat of an ulterior motive for writing this Sunday blog post. I want some fresh brownies… hint hint…

I like brownies. I also like generic domain names. It was nice to see a great generic domain name like Brownies.com being used by a company that makes and ships brownies. Fairytale Brownies is brownie company founded by friends, David Kravetz and Eileen Spitalny, who started it in 1992. The company has 30 year-round employees and 100 employees during the peak season.

The primary reason I found this company is that they own Brownies.com, which is where the company operates its business. In addition, and the impetus for my post, the company owns Brownie.com, but it does nothing with the domain name. There’s no 301 or 302 redirect, nor is there even a forward to Brownies.com.

If you visit Brownie.com by mistake, you may either end up on a dead page or quite possibly a ISP error page loaded with pay per click links. To make matters worse, since Fairytale Brownies is an Adwords advertiser, they could actually be paying Google to send what should already be their visitors to Brownies.com!

The company was smart enough to register both great generic domain names Brownies.com and Brownie.com to prevent another company from operating on the alternate, but they should be doing something with Brownie.com instead of having it error out.

PS: I love brownies 🙂

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

11 COMMENTS

  1. Maybe Fairytale already has more business than they can handle. With so few employees, there’s a possibility they may be looking to deal the site, or to build up later.

    Generating heavy traffic is not always a plus when it involves providing services. There are many businesses that want less traffic, which will allow them to provide better customer service.

    I’m sure the site can fetch 6 figures to the right taker.

    Would you know how a new site such as careerfield.org can register a new site this past June, and now generates 131,000+ unique visitors a month. The moment the site was registered, the traffic swelled up 10,000, 30,000, 90,000 and then to 131,000.

    The site is now ranked 21,000 on Alexa. It’s a regular job site. Interesting how they’re receiving massive traffic.

  2. In regards to careerfield.org, I won’t mention any of their keywords here, but I know that there are a few that are sending them heavy traffic. I analyzed the site at Compete. To go from no traffic to 131,000 per month is an interesting process.

    Brownies.com traffic peaked out at over 44,000 in December, 2009. Now they only generate 12,000 per month. I assume that they don’t want Brownie.com to push traffic over to them. They could always monetize the site, considering that traffic peaked out at 300 per month, and now is virtually nonexistent.

    Essentially, companies that operate with few employees are looking to provide good service. When there too many orders to fill, then it may reduce the level of customer service. It’s my perception though.

    Maybe they’re sitting on the domain like the hotels are with their generic GEO hotel names (your past article).

  3. I share your love of brownies… in more ways than one. 🙂

    But I have to disagree with the idea that companies should take generic domain names like this and be redirecting them to themselves. That’s what ToysRus.com did then the first bought Toys.com. Hmmm, which do you think was getting more traffic on a daily basis? Now they have a “portal” of sorts, but only for their properties and I think that is short-sighted.

    When you have something as valuable as toys.com, I think it makes more sense to not squander the value only for your own brand. I think this leaves much of the value wasted.

    My approach with such a valuable domain would be to make it truely a portal on the topic. Put things that are going to be of interest to just about everyone looking for “toys” and this includes access to ALL toy manufactures, perhaps in the form of a industry or perhaps a “toy” directory. An extensive directory of toys with photos, maybe it should be called a toy encyclopedia, would be awsome and a great tool for those looking for “spud guns” or toy steam engines.

    The site could generate a great amount of money from advertising, but the beauty is, the company that owns the site doesn’t have to pay a dime to advertise there. But if you can’t compete in the marketplace, you won’t like this idea.

    But if you are fearless, then you can see how you may not make every sale generated by the portal, but you can get paid for every sale anyway…! How cool would that be to get paid when your competitors make a sale or get a click?

    Brownie.com and brownies.com are great domains. What do you think a domainer who knows how to develop them could make with each of them per year…?

    At some point I think companies will look beyond their current business and realize the full potential that most are missing in their generic domains.

  4. Ah, but you’re all thinking like domainers and the average small business owner-entrepreneur likely does not have the in-depth understanding you credit them with.

    Chances are, they knew enough to grab the singular and plural dot.com to avoid a competitor getting the other version and creating confusion in the marketplace. But being a small company, they may not (and likely don’t) have the time to research and learn about monetizing domain names, etc.

    As an entrepreneur of 30+ years, having atrted and owned MANY businesses, I can’t believe they don’y WANT or NEED more traffic and more business. The customer service issue gets solved with money and more sales fuel the bank account.

    It’s likely that they do not understand the vale of the redirect and monetizing the other version of their domain name. Plain and simple. Why don’t you (the article writer) pitch them some consulting to accomplish these goals?

    They might just pay you in brownies!

    😉 Tommi

  5. Just received the following note from one of the founders:

    “Hi Elliot,
    Thank you so much for your blog post. There does seem to be an error with the DNS for brownie.com. It should in fact be pointing to brownies.com (like all of our domains). I appreciate you letting me know so that I can get it fixed. And yes, if you send me your address I’d be happy to send out some brownies as a thank you. :)”

  6. Great work Elliot and nice of them you re-pay you with their product.

    Maybe I’ll go out and find something wrong with the Heineken or BMW sites and hopefully they’ll throw a little something my way in return 😉

  7. @Elliot

    Good work. You definitely helped the company to avoid losing business. Many wouldn’t take the time and effort to point out that discrepancy in the forwarding.

    Will your apartment hold the crate of brownies? Any walnut brownies? You deserve respect for your good deed.

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