The Luckiest Company In The World...

...is the Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation.  Based in beautiful Perrysburg, OH, their tagline is: "Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation specializes in buying and selling Used Tube Mills, Used Pipe Mills and Used Rollforming Machines."  So what makes them lucky?

Last year, Google acquired Youtube and the company's servers went down.  They got mad, but instead of taking legal action they decided to turn the problem into an opportunity.

It turns out that this tube & rollform equipment corporation had one big asset.  Their domain name, www.utube.com, gets a lot of traffic by the sheer misspelling of www.youtube.com.  So much that all of a sudden that their machines could not handle it.  That's their luck.

Now, they have conveniently put a search box on the top of their web site, you can search for Free Ringtones, Shakira, Blackjack, Gambling, Extreme Travel and Snowboarding.  One has a hard time relating Shakira and Gambling to Tube & Rollform equipment, but they are there on the site.  See it for yourself.  They are selling tube and rollform equipment, but they are also domain squatting on utube.com.  And from what I hear, that is generating them north of $1000/day.  That's $360K straight to the bottom line, at 10% pretax that's like finding $4M of revenue all of a sudden.  That's luck..

So what's the moral of this story:  "Doesn't matter if you are the turtle or the hare, you can't go wrong if you generate traffic."

Call it La Fontaine 2.0

Comments

[ayse]

good for them! Might as well make a few bucks off of whatever kids are into these days...

[Dont be a dont bee]

What do you mean they are domain squatting on utube.com

They have an active site
It is not being offered for sale
The use is noninfringing and they had utube before youtube had youtube?

These facts preclude the possibility of the squatting you refer to

[Baris Karadogan]

It is "effectively domain squatting" since they are making money of traffic that's totally irrelevant to them.

The could not be considered a domain squatter becaue they did not buy the domain to do so, but they are luck in the fact that they can monetize it so.

We differ in the way we view domain squatting. You are looking at the intent, I am looking at the result.

[Emre Sokullu]

Red Herring'd :-)