I just read that legendary musician Snoop Dogg has decided to change his name to Snoop Lion, and smartly, it looks like he was able to buy SnoopLion.com in advance of the announcement. According to a Whois search, SnoopLion.com was registered in April of this year, although it’s currently under privacy.

SnoopLion.com is a developed website with information about Snoop Lion’s upcoming album, Reincarnated. The musician secured the matching Facebook (Facebook.com/SnoopLion) account, although he needed an underscore for the Twitter account (Twitter.com/Snoop_Lion).

I often read about famous name changes where the person or group did not register the corresponding domain name, and that either caused them to buy a more obscure domain name or it led to a legal battle. Instead of having to pay someone who may have beaten him to the punch, Snoop Lion and his marketing team were able to buy the name for less than $10.

Interestingly, Snoop’s given name is Calvin Broadus, and CalvinBroadus.com is not owned by the musician, but it is parked.

You can check out the Official Documentary Trailer for Reincarnated below:

I’ve never heard of Moo.com before, but they seem to have struck up a unique advertising deal with Facebook. If you click on the small box next to “Contact Info” on a Facebook profile, a small box pops up with a message that says, “Moo.com makes it easy to print your very own set of custom business cards. The first box is free.”

According to its website, Moo.com is a custom business card printer based in Providence, Rhode Island. Moo.com was founded in 2004, and the company has “raised over $5m in venture capital from the Accelerator Group, Index Ventures and Atlas Venture, the investors behind Skype, Betfair, Lovefilm, Last.fm and MySQL.”

I did some Whois research, and it looks like the domain name changed ownership in 2006, which corresponds with the company’s blog post in May of 2006. Prior to that, the domain name appears to have been owned by a different party.

The company offers an affiliate program, so I wonder if Facebook is being paid for every order/customer. Whatever the case may be, it’s a neat domain name and creative way of marketing it.

In my opinion, the entertainment business is not always on top of things when it comes to domain names. You can have a look at movie posters and commercials to see what I mean: hyphens, names with movie in them, .nets…etc.

Television shows, it would seem, would have more of a reason to own their exact match domain name. They’re usually on television for multiple seasons, people purchase box sets, and fans like to communicate and discuss weekly or daily episodes. In addition, many have unique names, so it’s likely the exact match name will be unregistered before filming.

Companies spend millions of dollars on marketing, so it’s peculiar they wouldn’t either register the domain name when the name is determined. In my opinion, there’s likely a decent amount of error traffic with these types of names since people assume they will find a website on the exact match .com.

Posted below is a list of popular television shows (in no particular order) and a note about whether the exact match .com name is owned by an entity associated with the respective tv show:

• Modern Family – No
• How I Met Your Mother – YES (strangely, not used)
• Entourage  – No
• Grey’s Anatomy  – No
• No Reservations  – No
• Chopped  – No
• Gold Rush  – No
• Bering Sea Gold  – No
• Alaska State Troopers  – No
• Weed Wars  – No
• Storage Wars  – No
• Chuck  – No
• American Idol – YES
• Private Practice – No
• Jersey Shore  – No
• Real World  – No
• Top Chef – No
• NCIS  – No
• Big Bang Theory  – No
• American Pickers  – YES
• Man Vs. Food – No
• Judge Judy – YES
• Desperate Housewives – YES
• Jeopardy – YES
• Wheel of Fortune – YES
• Price is Right – YES
• 60 Minutes – YES
• 20/20 – No
• The Mentalist    – No
• Survivor  – No
• Biggest Loser – YES