Sign in / up

back to article Cruise.co.uk stumps £560k to add 's' to domain

British "cruise community" website cruise.co.uk has set a new price record for a .co.uk domain, stumping a cool £560k to secure cruises.co.uk from German travel outfit Nees Reisen, the company announced today. The previous league leader in expensive Brit domains was domain recycle.co.uk, snaffled last October by ASAP Ventures …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Cruising

    And there was me thinking Gaydar had the stranglehold on Cruising sites. How wrong I am!

    (Coat tag, I'm stocking them up!)

    0 0
  2. Steve Roper
    Coat

    And yet another...

    ..."new site for online social networking, used to create a cruise community with user-generated content to meet the demands of this expanding sector".

    Oh no...

    <facepalm>

    Not ANOTHER Crap 2.0 social-networking wannabe! I thought this garbage was supposed to be on its way out? Looks like they wasted half a million quid to set another Orkutfacemyspace lookalike that'll go nowhere fast; cruises indeed. Glad I'm not a shareholder with that company!

    Mine's the one with the Hawaiian floral print and the sunnies and camera hanging off it.

    0 0
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Made of FAIL

    "a "new site for online social networking, used to create a cruise community with user-generated content to meet the demands of this expanding sector"."

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

    Biggest waste of half a million ever.

    0 0
  4. IanKRolfe

    Waste of Money

    If I was a shareholder of cruise.co.uk I would be upset about this! But I guess the German company must feel christmas has come early. For far less than £560k surely they could have bribed someone in Nominet to revoke the german co's ownership of a UK internet name, you know, like all the big co's in the US do with .coms??

    0 0
  5. TeeCee Gold badge
    Coat

    Sheesh. The cost of doing business these days.

    You sell something. You expand a bit to sell more than one of 'em and it costs you 560k.......

    0 0
  6. Richard Eustace
    Stop

    Why have one cr@p site when you can have two

    Is it just me or does anyone else think they would have been better spending some of the money redesigning their current site?

    0 0
  7. Mark Johnson

    Easy money!

    I'm off to buy theregisters.co.uk. Yours for a cool million.

    0 0
  8. Alan Gregson Silver badge

    Colon

    It took several re-reads before I found the first N is Seamus's surname.

    0 0
  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    As mentioned

    So... a German company holding a .co.uk domain isn't cybersquatting?

    I felt sorry for cruise.co.uk until it revealed they were just another bunch of web2.0 wannabes and nothing to do with actual cruises.

    0 0
  10. Antony Shepherd

    Worth every penny!

    After all, they wouldn't want anyone to associate them with that scientologist nut-job of an actor, would they?

    0 0
  11. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Couple of good reasons

    They might already have spent £££'s on research to show that people are more likely to search for 'cruises' rather than 'cruise' in google, so if they just added an 's' then this would result in bumping up their position on the top 5 list on the google search results page.

    Our UK government regularly spends billions on research and consultation which is very very poor quality and/or biased, so it is not unreasonable to assume that if this company is willing to have spent 0.5 million pounds on an extra 's' then they might have done some research to make a good business case for it.

    The other thing is that if people google for 'cruise', then what will the results actually be? Would they then type 'cruises' to get better results?

    0 0
  12. Neil

    Tom?

    I'm sure everyones favourite Scientologist will be along shortly to sue the knickers off of the owners of both domains. It's the American way.

    0 0
  13. Trotsky

    Marketing ploy?

    Where's the proof they stumped up the cash? Maybe some deal was struck whereby the purchase price was inflated to get some cheap publicity.

    0 0
  14. system

    What a waste...

    ...when the domain crappyweb20.cruise.co.uk was freely available to them.

    @MichaelG: if it was all done for google rankings, they could easily have got themselves listed under the search term "cruises" regardless of their domain, and for a lot less cash.

    0 0
  15. James Cleveland
    Thumb Down

    You think with that amount of money

    They'd at least pay a decent designer

    0 0
  16. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    good investment

    the internet is still in its teenagehood!

    Google, Yahoo and other search engines are just a phase in the

    lifetime of the internet.

    they were (still are for a lot of us!) great in the begining, since they provided an easy way to find websites/information. The winners obviously are those that appear in the first page rank!

    but now, try googling for cruise, and see how many results you get.

    (I got 'Results 1 - 10 of about 213,000,000 for cruise ')

    how would you know that the one you were looking for is

    not the 90,397,376th website?

    Direct traffic (i.e typing what you are looking for directly in the address bar)

    is the next phase.It is growing fast! And this is why a lot of companies are

    paying fortunes for premium domains.

    of course, to be able to afford these prime spots, a company must be good at what it does!

    (+ paying such a price, attracts media attention, and publicity)

    great move by cruise.co.uk !

    0 0
This topic is closed for new posts.