Melanie Oudin .com: Protecting a Brand
I frequently see cybersquatters quickly grab the .com domain names of up and coming athletes, musicians, and entertainers. Oftentimes, it happens when sports magazines announce a new class of top recruits or after a great public performance when people buy these names like lotto tickets hoping the athlete/celebrity hits it big and the name presumably becomes valuable.
Melanie Oudin is a 17 year old woman from Marietta, Georgia currently competing in the US Open tennis tournament in Flushing Queens, New York. This afternoon, Oudin won over the pro-American crowd by defeating 13th ranked Nadia Petrova from Russing in three sets, and is now one of the final 8 women competing in the tournament.
I wanted to see when someone tried to capitalize on Oudin’s success by registering the MelanieOudin.com, and I found that her father had registered it back in 2007 – a very smart move! A professional athlete is a brand, and it’s important to protect the brand as early as possible.
With Melanie Oudin’s great performance in the US Open so far, now might be a smart time to add privacy guard to prevent unwanted emails, although DomainTools has already archived the email address by now.
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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 sold seven figures worth of domain names in the last five years. 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 | Google + | Facebook | Email
wannadevelop.com
She is a nice girl… Too bad the website doesn’t show up on the engines even for her own name because it isn’t linked-up anywhere.. Maybe now it will get crawled and indexed properly… Thanks to you! š
gpmgroup
DomainTools has already archived the email address by now.
DomainTools should not be allowed to archive historical WHOIS data. Whether it’s scraped or crawled. This is a perfect example of why they should respect other peoples data.
Open and transparent WHOIS data benefits everyone and DomainTools behaviour works against ICANNs polices as it causes more people to use Privacy Services when otherwise they would not need to.
Acro
Owning domains of full names of individuals may or may not cause problems, depending on how unique they are. The names of famous people are most likely infringing and such registrations are risky. On the other hand, first names in any TLD are good investments, e.g. in this case I have Melanie.biz š
Elliot
Very true – all depends on usage. I’ve seen UDRP cases go both ways for full names. Oftentimes people (politicians especially) believe they are more famous than they really are.
First and last names are definitely defensible – well, perhaps the Michelman.com case (I believe that’s the spelling) is the exception. Tucows and NetIdentity have both defended many surnames.
Mike
MelanieOudin.com is actually a live site.. not sure when they put the content though.
I’m kinda surprised you don’t owe your own name….
Elliot
@ Mike
Yeah – smart thinking by them!
My name was registered many years ago. I should blog about the lost $$$ that could be spent buying domain names that you can’t sell for sentimental reasons. I could have paid $1k for my .com domain name, but I didn’t do it… there’s more to the story than that, but I didn’t want to have $$$$ locked up in a domain name I could/would never sell.
Isa Lube
I love the shoes and her tennis games as well