There are many publicly traded companies that own the .com domain name that match their stock symbol. One example, of course, is Facebook, which acquired FB.com last year and now trades under the FB symbol on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

I thought it would be interesting to do an analysis of the 30 companies that are  components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). Listed below are the companies, the stock symbol, and a Yes or No for whether the company owns the stock symbol .com domain name.

• 3M Co – MMM – Yes
• Alcoa Inc – AA – No
• American Express – AXP – No
• AT&T Inc – T – No
• Bank of America Corp – BAC  – Yes
• Boeing Co – BA – No
• Caterpillar Inc – CAT – Yes
• Chevron Corp – CVX – No
• Cisco Systems Inc – CSCO – No
• E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co – DD – No
• Exxon Mobil Corp – XOM – Yes
• General Electric Co – GE – Yes
• Hewlett-Packard Co – HPQ – Yes
• Home Depot Inc – HD – No
• Intel Corp – INTC – Yes
• International Business Machines Co – IBM – Yes
• Johnson & Johnson – JNJ – Yes
• JPMorgan Chase and Co – JPM – Yes
• Kraft Foods Inc – KFT – No
• McDonald’s Corp – MCD – Yes
• Merck & Co Inc – MRK – No
• Microsoft Corp – MSFT – No
• Pfizer Inc – PFE – No
• Procter & Gamble Co – PG – Yes
• The Coca-Cola Co – KO – Yes
• Travelers Companies Inc – TRV – No
• United Technologies Corp – UTX – No
• Verizon Communications Inc – VZ – No
• Wal-Mart Stores Inc – WMT – No
• Walt Disney Co – DIS – No

Somewhat surprisingly, 13 of the 30 DJIA components own their stock symbol domain name. It appears that some don’t even use their domain names though. MCD.com and HPQ.com don’t resolve for me, which is a bit silly since they could easily be forwarded if development isn’t warranted.

For the life of me, I couldn’t recall the first domain name I ever registered. A few people have asked me over the years, and I had a vague idea, but I couldn’t recall it and didn’t have a record of it. I knew it was registered at Network Solutions sometime around the beginning of 2003, but I didn’t know much else.

Thanks to Christie Chute,  Manager of Monetization and Aftermarket Sales at Web.com, I was able to find out the first domain name I ever registered.

The domain name I purchased on October 31, 2002 was Legal-Aids.com. It appears this name was dropped at some point, re-registered in 2005, and it seems to have expired within the last couple of days. It is not the type of domain name I would purchase today, but it was my starting point in the domain industry.

The next domain names I registered a few days later were SeekNewYorkCity.com, SeekBoston.com, SeekDC.com, and SeekPhilly.com.

I got a fairly late start compared to many of the people I admire who have successful businesses, but I spent a lot of time soaking in as much information as I could in order to learn what domain names sell for how much, and why. I think someone could start today and be very successful, but I don’t think this is a business in which someone can expect to become rich overnight.

I’ve registered some truly crappy domain names in my time, but I continued to learn from my mistakes and make better purchases.

What was the first domain name you purchased?

I want to take a moment to thank EuroDNS for advertising on my blog for almost a year. The company continued to renew its banner advertisement monthly for quite some time, and I appreciate their supporting my blog.

I also want to thank two new advertisers on my website.

Stevan Lieberman is an attorney at Greenberg & Lieberman, a Washington, DC based law firm that primarily specializes in intellectual property. Lieberman is widely respected in the domain space.

For those of you who purchase descriptive domain names, you’ve likely seen Nokta Domains in many Whois lookups. Nokta owns a huge portfolio of fantastic domain names spanning many verticals. The company actively buys and sells domain names.

I welcome Nokta Domains and Stevan Lieberman, and I want to thank them for advertising. Without the support of companies within the domain name ecosystem, I wouldn’t be writing my blog, so I hope you support them, too!