Marketing Land published an article covering the use of hashtags and urls in 2017 Super Bowl commercials. By Marketing Land’s calculation, domain names appeared in 26 of the 66 Super Bowl ads (39%) and hashtags appeared in 20 of the 66 Super Bowl ads (30%). I took  a bit of a deeper dive to look at the usage of urls in this year’s Super Bowl commercials and share what I found.

In the Marketing Land article, there was a table showing the  order of advertisements along with columns documenting whether the advertiser used a hashtag, URL (domain name), Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram in their commercial. This morning, I  watched all of the Super Bowl commercials that used a domain name, as noted in the Marketing Land  table.

The full list of advertisers and the domain name used in their commerical is below. Here’s a snapshot analysis of the types of domain names that were used in the 2017 Super Bowl commercials:

• .com  – 24
• .org  – 1
• new gTLD extensions – 1 (.movie)
• Tagline / call to action / made up / off-brand SB domain names (like PowerPastImpossible.org) – 4

Domain names used in 2017 Super Bowl commercials:

This morning, I watched Jimmy Fallon’s interview with New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick and Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman. During the interview, Fallon suggested  that Edelman retire and open a restaurant called Edelman’s Catch because of the incredible catch he made during the Super Bowl.

Here’s the clip:

After hearing Fallon’s suggestion, I was curious if someone had registered the EdelmansCatch.com domain name. I assumed

Someone mentioned my name in a NamePros thread the other day discussing one word .com domain names. The comment was “Single word domains don’t sell quickly. Just ask Elliot Silver…he has had words on the market for a while.” I tend to agree with the comment to a point.

In my opinion, meaningful one word .com domain names are highly liquid. They sell regularly, and there are at least 20  people that I know personally who actively pursue these domain names and will spend four, five, and six figures for the right .com domain names. I am always on the hunt for great one word .com domain names and it seems like I am competing with friends and colleagues to get these great dictionary .com names at fair prices. Without a doubt, meaningful one word .com domain names are among the most valuable types of domain names.

On the other hand,

I am clearly biased, but I think Travels.com is a great travel domain name. I also think a well funded startup or a major travel company will acquire Travels.com for quite a bit of money some day. It’s the reason I passed on a low 6 figure offer this past July, and I am steadfast in that belief.

In the meantime, I decided to try something besides parking Travels.com. If you visit Travels.com right now, you can see that it is a hotel booking site powered by Booking.com. Essentially, Booking.com does everything with a Travels.com logo.

Travels.com gets thousands of visits a month and makes a decent chunk of pay per click revenue. It also gets quite a few offers and inquiries. I am willing to forego this PPC revenue while I test this Booking.com affiliate page. My thought is that a couple of hotel reservations a month will likely produce more revenue than pay per click advertising. We shall see.

The downside risk is that it

I love the holiday season. People are more cheerful, friends and family send photo postcards, the snow begins to fall in New England ushering in the ski season, and I spend time traveling a bit more with my family, working on my “tan” and tennis game. Unfortunately, I am still working about as much as usual.

During the last two weeks of the year, it seems that most people are super busy. People have to close out their books, they have vacation days, they have office holidays, and people are less available to make deals happen. Emails either go unanswered or the response is that they will get back to me after the holidays. With so many people taking vacation days or simply busy with holiday-related activities, it’s tough to get deals done.

Every year around this time, it seems like