Here is something that makes me shake my head each time I come across it:
Why does the Walt Disney Company continue to hang on to the Go.com domain for nearly all its sites? Disney owns major, stand-alone brand properties such as ABC, ESPN, and, of course, Disney. They also have lesser sites such as Family.com, FamilyFun, Wondertime, and Movies.com. With the exception of Movies.com all sites are found within the Go.com domain. For example, ESPN is found at espn.go.com even though, as far as I can tell, their advertising pushes ESPN.com.
What I don’t understand is why they need to run these sites through the Go.com domain.
Disney does have a long history with Go.com creating it in 1998 out of some acquisitions that included InfoSeek. But things did not go so well and at one point, back in 2001, Disney actually announced [searchenginewatch.com] it would close the site (see Brett’s eulogy to InfoSeek [webmasterworld.com]) but that never happened.
So why hold on to it? Here are 5 possibilities, though most make little sense to me:
- They want to push their Go.com portal. Right! And I want them to bring back InfoSeek while they are at it! Who uses Go.com? Yes, it is highly ranked in terms of traffic (for what it is worth Alexa ranks it at #14 in the US and #43 globally) but the only reason the Go network ranks high is not because of the main site but because of the properties it supports.
- They don’t want to lose out on the SEO benefits they have accrued given their longevity. While this makes some sense, in today’s SE environment would they really lose much if they redirected the individual properties? I can’t believe that redirecting from espn.go.com to espn.com is going to effect much if anything. Besides they are so big they can just call up Google, Yahoo and MSN and tell them what is going on! Additionally, isn’t it likely that a large majority of their traffic is coming by direct means and not through search engines?
- Execs listen to the techies and not the marketers. Yes, I can see that being a reason. The tech people view it as a pain to make the changes and tell that to the top execs. Marketers may be telling the execs something different like “All our advertising says ESPN.com and when a customer types it in where do they end up? Not at ESPN.com. How dumb is that?” The execs side with the tech people because they don’t know tech and have to believe what they hear. Now I’m not a real techie person but from what I know this can’t take one person more than a week (if not less) to install the needed redirects on various servers. Maybe someone can shed more light on this one.
- It is easier for their advertising salespeople to say: “We can run your ad across our entire Go network” than it is to say: “We can run your ad across all Disney sites such as ESPN, Disney, ABC, Movies.com, etc.” Well this one I can understand. The old KISS formula works for salespeople. But if the salesperson uses the first statement aren’t advertisers going to respond: “The what network? What sites are on that?” in which case the salesperson will need to recite the list anyway.
- They don’t want to spend the money on updating the corporate business cards for thousands of executives. Yes, the old cost conscious argument. For me this makes the most sense especially if their emails are tied to the Go.com domain (not sure of this). Since it is much easier to measure the cost (i.e., printing new cards) rather than the benefit (i.e., less confusion for customers) I think I’ll pick this as the main reason!
Anyone have any other possibilities?
