This morning, TechCrunch published an article about a banking and financial services startup called Vivid, a self-described “unique mobile banking app.” While the startup’s brand name is Vivid, it uses the Vivid.Money domain name for its website. There’s nothing really wrong with using a .Money domain name, but in my opinion, Vivid should add “Money” to its branding, and either be known as Vivid Money or Vivid.Money. I think brands operating on new extensions should embrace the extension, and it is especially important in the case of this startup called Vivid.
One of the most well-known brands in the adult entertainment industry is a company called Vivid Entertainment. The company operates many different brands, and many of those brands also have Vivid in their branding. As you might expect from a well-known brand such as Vivid, the company operates on the brand match Vivid.com domain name (definitely not safe for work – especially working from home with kids around!).
Vivid, the banking services company, may primarily be an app-based business, but people will inevitably try to find the company’s website. It is very likely that people will directly navigate to the Vivid.com adult website because they have a habit of appending .com to a brand name. Ordinarily, when customers accidentally navigate to the wrong domain name and website, it is easy enough for them to navigate to Google to search for the correct website. In the case of Vivid, some customers might get very upset if they end up on an adult website without any warning.
I happen to like the term “Vivid”, and I think it is a neat brand name. If I was operating this brand called Vivid and wanted to make it less likely that my customers would end up on an adult website, I would make it as clear as possible that the brand is Vivid Money. Smartly, the company owns the matching VividMoney.com domain name, so the addition of Money to the brand would be a pretty straightforward change.
Sorry but reading this post comes across more like an advertisement, paid post, or trying to impress this company.
I understand it’s not a paid post but just comes across like it, especially when an experienced domain like you suggests Vivid.Money
No I don’t think so. I think that’s just your bias speaking. You don’t like to see nTLD get reported on.
In case you didn’t read, he told you, their website IS vivid.money. So no, he is not “suggesting it”, but merely telling you the facts.
You base your opinions on your feelings. Perhaps Vivid.money is a great domain for them. Perhaps they are seeing a lot of traffic. Perhaps they can attribute that to their domain. You should ask them.
I guess you are not aware of nTLDs shutting down all the time.
LOL don’t even go there. Do I need to break out the ‘facts’? .com websites don’t ‘shut down’? Shall we view an objective comparison? For the last 2 years, websites have been on the decline. The amount of websites have seen a sharp, sustained decline. Do you feel lucky?
There is a difference between a site shutting down Vs a TLD shutting down.
LOL yea Elliot asks which ones. you mean .brands? ~70 shut down and ~550 still exist!
Within 550 .brand ext, 18,722 domains were registered (2019). Of those, 12,509 had active websites, (DEC 31 2019). It has been growing. Not ‘shutting down’.
The usage absolutely destroy .com stats.
Kinda comparing apples to oranges, since these are .brands and not public TLD, but you’re the one that went here.
Somehow domaining ‘thinks’ 12,500 active websites by 550 companies is ‘failing’…
Can you elaborate? What nTLDs have shut down?
Yes, telling a company I think it is screwing up its branding is a great way to ingratiate myself with them. LOL.
I was piggybacking on my older post about startups needing to embrace the domain extension in their branding to avoid confusing customers when they do not own the brand matching .com domain name. In this case, the brand match .com domain name is used by a hardcore pornographic website, so it seems even more wise to avoid losing traffic there. I don’t really care if they would choose Vivid Money or Vivid.Money for branding. They did choose Vivid.Money for their url over the matching .com url they own, so they seem to have an affinity for Vivid.Money over VividMoney.com. Beyond that, it was something I noticed and chose to highlight on this domain name focused blog.
Also, I want to make sure to reiterate that I hardly ever do any type of paid or otherwise sponsored articles here. When I do, they are clearly marked and all of the proceeds is donated by the company to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute via my Pan-Mass Challenge ride.
Thx, I know you don’t do any paid/sponsored posts that’s why I mentioned that already.
I think you are over-reacting. When I read it, I don’t feel like its an ad. To me, it’s just an experienced domainer sharing his opinions regarding the domain name of a company featured by TechCrunch.
I meant Ad for .Money
If they take your suggestion, then they should add a lot more to their marketing due to traffic bleed to .com
Would say the exact same thing for pretty much any other startup using a new gTLD extension, which was covered already and linked to within the article: https://domaininvesting.com/embrace-the-extension-in-branding/
I usually prefer companies to embrace the extension too but in this case, I really like the way they’re using it.
“Money” might not be in their branding but it is in their slogan, “Let your money grow”, I think Vivid.Money integrates perfectly and besides vivid.com, it was the best choice for them.
When no extension is shown anywhere (no slogans, don’t count. “I am lovin’ it”, so what am I assuming? McDonald’s is at .it? .lovin? .am?), people naturally assume that it is on .com (unless it is a local service for a country with a strong cctld, then it is mostly .cctld with considerable .com still there).
So, yes, you want the cool brand so bad, you are sacrificing lots of your success and brand equity by creating ambiguity and confusion.
The reality is that most people, if they don’t have the link to click on it directly, they will google the comapny, they will not type .com by themselves and the few that will do that they will then proceed to google. IMO, it’s a perfect use of .money. A name they probably hand-regged.
As I said, the .com would be better but it’s not always an option(budget, already in use). .Money is a clear 2nd choice for me and fits them better than five-figure domains like vivid.net, vivid.co and vivid.io.
Epic stuffup! Not only did they choose a new tld but the .com is a famous porn site!
Can you imagine all the complaints and confusion? 12 months until they do a full rebrand (or go out of business),
For those that are interested in actual evidence and not some domainer conjecture – “leaked traffic” (bogey-man):
https://361856-1125667-1-raikfcquaxqncofqfm.stackpathdns.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/vivid.png
screenshot showing 90 day alexa traffic for vivid.com
From #66,734 > #109,376 in just 90 days.
Seems vivid.com might be getting terrorized? Oh no, that doesn’t fit the narrative!
Vivid.com’s traffic flow would completely swamp vivid.money. Not sure what your point is.
Vivid.money will have lots of angry customers because people do not want to land on a porn site when going to a bank. Even if 5% of them land on the porn site each day that is a huge problem.
They will either rebrand or go out of business…..watch.
Oh really? Let’s look at the other way around, shall we?
What does the ‘big guy’ (zoom.us) do to the ‘little fry’ (zoomus.com)?
https://361856-1125667-1-raikfcquaxqncofqfm.stackpathdns.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/zoom.png
Search Traffic:
“The % of organic search referrals to this site that come from this keyword.”
Share of Voice:
“The % of all searches for this keyword that sent traffic to this website.”
~6% of zoomus.com TOTAL (search) traffic comes from (probably) mistaken visits – via search engines.
Even their EMD “zoomus.com” ONLY gets 12% CTR (while being 7.6% of where all their traffic comes from in the first place)…pathetic. How many of those visitors bounced instantly?
6% of zoomus.com traffic is probably like .1% of zoom.us.
There you go…get off on your ‘leaked traffic’. More evidence is there if you can figure it out.
Hard to follow much of this, but the 6% confusion sounds like a huge figure to me. Maybe you can explain it more clearly.
Decided to explain the search traffic a bit more. For other ppl that might not ‘get it’.
The list truncates but the results diminish. More data would barely help.
Basically you can figure around 6% of the *searches* resulting in traffic to ZOOMUS.COM was *meant* for zoom.us.
zoomus.com probably gets 1/1000th of the traffic that zoom.us gets.
So if zoomus.com is collecting 6% of ITS traffic by mistake, in a RELATIVE way, ZOOM.US is losing >0.1% of its (search) traffic to ZOOMUS.COM.
Not everything is cut and dry, but you get the idea. Leaked traffic is negligible in the case of search engine confusion.
Your example is not adequate. What you should have been comparing is to the theoretical situation if zoom.us did not own zoom.com and leaked traffic there.
That could have been considerable. I remember first time I heard about zoom, a guy told me that is how he holds his training sessions. And I said what is the website, zoom.com? And he paused for few secs and said “I think so”. It wasn’t. And the guy whose livelihood came from using the tool, couldn’t remember.
And that is the .US, which kind of has its own compartment in the minds of Americans, because they see it so often and are used to it.
ngtlds would be a disaster for memorability and leaks, emails being the biggest concern.
wish I could help yas out more but you need to do your own tests. Figure it out for yourselves.
You can glean a lot more from these kinds of stats with your own insight.
For example, knowing what % of these searches are *probably* from someone that visited the .com in error in the first place. Which would result in them searching what they did in the zoomus.com vs zoom.us example I’m showing.
Your own analytics tells you a boat load more than this limited data.
All your leaked traffic claims will come to embarrass you like everything else. Because you don’t have a clue.
Have you tested? Na, you guys just make this stuff up. That’s why I give domaining such a hard time. Lies and fakes.
PS: El Agamirza
You’re right. It isn’t a perfect example.
Except a couple weeks ago everyone was talking about how zoomus.com is leaking traffic to zoomus.com.
They said, when you tell someone “zoom.us” they will be mistaken.
It’s fresh in the minds and related. They were wrong last week and they are wrong now.
“people are going to complain they went to a porn site”.
^The bogey-man this week.
Look at the data and figure it out yourself.
People embrace these sort of opportunities which nTLD provide. That is to be unique, new, creative, exacting, smarter. You’re in denial.
Traffic doesn’t exactly equate to good traffic on your .coms! Simple. I can’t believe domainers get off over this trash ‘mistaken traffic’. It’s worthless AT BEST. On top of it, that ‘mistaken traffic’ is of negligible amount!
If all these ‘pros’ with .com portfolios had one ounce of evidence to show that their traffic blasted off on their .com once a matching nTLD was developed, we would know.
You’re left with simply: nTLDs are going to ‘fail’. Look around. People are using them more frequently. Awareness is about to go critical, much to your dismay.
I’ve heard it all: “nTLD will only make our .coms more valuable”…yea, right, stick a fork in that…I can turn the tables: It’s been many years now. nTLD are still here (growing) and .coms haven’t been increasing in value. Someone’s been wrong so far.
Luckily, I realized who the dismally biased group of investors were making these ridiculous claims and ran the other way.
I have around 5000 domains redirected to my portfolio site, 95%+ .coms and get around 1200 daily visitors just from that. Undeveloped .coms providing that many people, also around 1/3 USA, around 60% developed countries. Very high quality traffic. And I am not focused on buying traffic names, just what I believe to be great brandables for my branding customers. If I were to hold 5000 ngtlds, I doubt I’d get even 100 a day.
But… Regular business normally holds just 1 name. And he won’t get much traffic. However, what he will get is memorability. If a client knows you are at .com, all he has to focus is on remembering your brand. And when he sees just your brand, he assumes adding .com will take them to the page. If the client has to remember the brand and the extension, the memorability index shoots down.
Another huge benefit is emails. You might even spell out your extension to your client, partner, investor, neighbor etc. and he might have heard it just fine, but when he starts typing on his laptop, he just can’t help but end it in .com. This is especially true for .co, from my experience.
NIce article Elliot.
I definitely think that companies should embrace extension in their branding, and should particularly aim for brands where keyword goes well with the extension from semantic point of view.
Vivid.Money makes sense, so why not to use it in logo and brand as such.
The reason why is they want to be called “Vivid”, the .money bit is just the closest extension they could get for reg fee. Many co’s want a short, cool snappy brand.
How about buying viv.id indonesian domain? )
That’s such a short, cool domain hack for them! I would buy it if I were them.
A porn site in a .com should be a reject for any alt .ext for any legit company.
Could be the .com site creating porn currency LOL
Since they are a start-up and willing to use a New G how about a crowd sourced alternative list at or near reg fee.
money.link is at 6300,
money.live is 760
neither have active .coms
I have a question regarding the domain ending *. rocks. Have heard that there are some issues with regards to domain reputation in case you use the ending at emails, etc. Coming accross *.rocks more frequently http://www.monkee.rocks, http://www.castl.rocks, etc also for finance related topics – but mostly startups.
No idea. I can not recall seeing any .Rocks domain names being used anywhere.
Should not be any issues as .rocks has no reputation
Vivid.money is an unadulterated fail or should that be an adulterated failure (not sure)! Either way it is proof positive that CEOs make horrible decisions capable of sewering their own companies
Like your mom told you: Just because Johnny is doing it doesn’t make it right