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!