Brand Marketing

TechCrunch just published an article about a $75 million fundraising round for a collectible card startup called Alt. The startup had previously raised $31 million in funding:

Collectible card trading platform Alt raises $75M as it eyes other asset categories and preps its mobile launch https://t.co/DvPJDhy4Dd by @grg

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) November 11, 2021

For its website, Alt uses the off-brand OnlyAlt.com domain name. An alternative to a keyword brand .com domain name like this might be a brand-match alternative extension. Ordinarily, this would probably be no big deal, but the usage of the Alt.com domain name could pose a unique challenge to the card trading platform.

A little over a week ago, I read that Facebook was planning to rebrand in a fashion similar to the Google / Alphabet rebrand. The idea behind the rebrand was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to plan to turn the company into a metaverse-focused business. The news, as I understand, was first reported by The Verge.

Soon after the article was published in The Verge, speculation began to mount about what Facebook – or perhaps a parent entity would be called. Because a Mark Zuckerberg related entity owned Meta.com already, it would be pretty easy for Facebook to rebrand as Meta. At the time of publication, Meta.com was forwarding to Meta.org, the website for a project called Meta from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Wayfair is one of Amazon’s largest competitors. The publicly traded company (W on the NYSE) has a market capitalization of nearly $25 billion. While Wayfair.com is a major brand name today, the company started out by purchasing and utilizing solid keyword .com domain names and building out websites on them. Ten years ago, the company that had been known as CSN Stores rebranded as Wayfair, and the rest is history.

The move off of individual keyword domain name brands and into one larger umbrella brand turned out to be a prescient decision as Google changes deemphasized the search engine value of keyword matching .com domain names. Instead of smaller websites operating individually, the company wisely chose to operate under an umbrella brand name called Wayfair.

Late last night, The Verge published an article reporting that “Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name,” and it could be done in similar fashion to how Google created a parent brand in Alphabet. The article stated that the rebrand is being undertaken “to reflect its focus on building the metaverse.”

Exclusive: Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name https://t.co/0NuPhWQsc5 pic.twitter.com/htkzkRBCGI

— The Verge (@verge) October 20, 2021

I speculated / guessed that perhaps Facebook was the private buyer behind the $149,000 purchase of the Meta.so domain name and if this is the case, perhaps the company could rebrand as Metaso or something along those lines.