The Oakland Athletics baseball team announced that it will begin using the Athletics.com domain name for its website. The baseball franchise, or quite possibly Major League Baseball, purchased the Athletics.com domain name back in May of 2012, in a deal that had been reported in initially by Jamie Zoch of DotWeekly and written about further in Domain Name Wire. The purchase price of Athletics.com was not revealed.
The decision to rebrand the website from OaklandAthletics.com to Athletics.com was made to keep all of the team’s branding and social media the same. Here’s how the team announced the news today:
“In an effort to ease fan access to the official club website and, in turn, conform with most other Major League clubs’ sites, the A’s have announced “athletics.com” as their new brand domain.
The switch, from the original “oaklandathletics.com,” is effective immediately, and it “will make accessing the Athletics much easier and faster for fans,” the team said in a statement.
Moreover, the name matches that of the A’s official social media accounts, including @Athletics on Twitter.”
In 2009, just about 73% of MLB teams owned the matching team name .com domain name. Since that time, a number of teams / MLB were able to buy their .com domain name, including Athletics.com, Angels.com, Rockies.com, and Cardinals.com. It appears that there are only a handful of teams remaining that do not own the exact match .com for their franchise website. Those team name .com domain names include: Rangers.com, Rays.com, Twins.com, and Giants.com.
Kudos to the Athletics and Major League Baseball for buying and using Athletics.com.
Are they also going to rebrand their name from Oakland Athletics to just Athletics, in order to match their Twitter handle and website name? Do fans often remember them as Oakland Athletics or Athletics when they go to the web?
I have been an A’s fan since I was a kid, cool to see them get this…of course that being said I don’t ever go to their website, any sports scores I get through an app.
Wait, I thought dot com was dead and gtlds had taken over? Why didn’t they just use athletics.plumber? Or wait, do I mean athletics.plumbing? How about athletics.ceo or maybe athletics.tattoo. Now I understand why dot com is dead. Lol
Giants.com is owned by the NY Football Giants, so that is at least one exact match MLB domain that will never change hands.
I wonder how they’ll use .mlb or if it was just a defensive new TLD application.
As a Giants.com fan,I’m glad they have the name. Gmen baby!!!