Our stand against domain squatting and why we changed our name
Domain squatting or Cybersquatting is a parasitic business. It serves no genuine value creation, and in my view, similar to gambling. A squatter registers a domain with the hope of one day having that domain become valuable enough to profit by selling the domain to the company who created value to the domain in the first place.
Herein leads to the reason that prompted our name change. Originally MatchCast, we have decided to change our name to MatchCasts so we can own our own .com domain without having to pay an arm and a leg for it.
MatchCast started in the mid of 2019 with the goal of matching brands with amazing podcasters to support a growing audio advertising ecosystem. The 2 words in our name describe what we do as a company perfectly. Unfortunately, we could not own matchcast.com since it is currently squatted on.
In the end, we settled for MatchCast.co and went about building what really mattered — our business.
In July 2019, we introduced MatchCast to the world and the search term of MatchCast starts to spike in Google Trends.
In October, we finally caught the attention of domain brokers and I received our first email from Steven enquiring if we will be keen to purchase MatchCast.com.
In my heart, that sinking feeling of having built a business off the domain name MatchCast, the squatters have now come to profit from what we have created.
I waited a few weeks to reply to Steven and by this time, I offered what I think to be a generous offer of US$500.
Unfortunately, Steven was clearly not interested to further the conversation at US$500. He thinks that securing matchcast.com is not a priority. In my mind, I was thinking, why it be anyone’s priority to deal with a parasitic domain squatter ?!?
To be honest, I knew deep down in my gut that this was going to happen, but I just didn’t think it was something I need to deal with while building the business.
It also dawns on me that as we spend more effort building our business, the more value MatchCast has and the more the domain squatter will hold us ransom further into the future.
So today, we officially announced MatchCast will now be known as MatchCasts.
Essentially nothing has changed about the way we approached our business and our goal of building an amazing audio advertising ad-tech platform. The best part of this change, we have registered MatchCasts.com as a domain, unified all our social handle to MatchCasts and not having to deal with domain squatters any more while being an “s” ahead.
#Branding #DomainSquatting
