Standard & Poor’s Bank Ratings #FAIL

I am generally impressed when I see a mainstream company have ownership of a great descriptive domain name, especially if said domain name would be worth a lot of money to other companies, including competitors.

A descriptive domain name can either help enhance a company’s web presence, like Baby.com does for Johnson & Johnson, or it can be used to forward traffic to the company’s primary website, like Barnes & Noble does with Books.com. These two companies use their respective descriptive domain names completely differently, but certainly both usages are effective.

Standard & Poor’s (S&P), one of the largest bank, government, credit (and more) ratings agencies, has been in the news quite a bit, and it hasn’t generally been for positive reasons. I hate political discussions, and I am certainly not an economist, so I will save you a synopsis of the current state of S&P and why they’ve been in the news.

I was duly impressed when I saw that the company owns BankRatings.com, clearly a great descriptive domain name for its business. I was much less impressed when I saw that not only has the company not appeared to develop the domain name, but it doesn’t redirect it anywhere either. Technically, the domain name is owned by The McGraw Hill Companies, although the registrant email is @sandp.com. The domain name was created back in 1997, and it’s been owned by the company since at least 2001.

What a waste of a valuable domain name!

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
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 closed eight figures in deals. 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 | Facebook | LinkedIn

4 COMMENTS

  1. That why we can ranked them as F- a big fat F in their domain knowledge.
    They have no business rating others when they can’t get their A*ss in order and the DOJ is investigating them for conflict in interest.

    They make money by ratings the banks they “sleep” with…WTF

    now we know

  2. Cupla other good examples of category defining, killer descriptive domains that are forwarded/redirected to existing sites of major corporations are:

    LOANS.com —> Bank Of America

    CASINOS.com —-> To Casino/Hotel/Gambing behemouth Caesars Entertainment (formerly Harrah’s), who also owns World Series Poker

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