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information Crossing the Language Barrier: Four Companies Who Own the US and UK Spelling

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Spelling is an interesting subject in domaining. Much of the world speaks English, but the spelling can be different. Outside of North America, many English words have subtle differences. The British spelling would be used across several continents in countries such as Australia, India and South Africa. If you are a company with an international presence, would you ensure that you owned both variations before launching a brand?

Here, we’ve documented four brands that have acquired both American and British versions of a domain name.

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Color.com and Colour.com

Color Genomics is a Californian company that helps its users proactively manage their health. The company has received close to $100 million in funding and although Color was founded in 2013, they made sure acquire both Color.com and Colour.com, the American and British spelling respectively.

Interestingly, both domains were acquired from the same company. In 2010, GoDaddy brokered the sale of Color.com to the creators of a mobile photo app who spent $350,000 to acquire the domain. Separately, the company’s founders also acquired Colour.com for an undisclosed price. After raising $41 million in funding, the Color app makers shut the service down just in October 2012.

It looks as though the domain remained in the possession of the Color app founders until 2016 when both Color.com and Colour.com started forwarding to getcolor.com.


Theater.com and Theatre.com

The John Gore Organization controls several popular domains and websites including Broadway.com. Cleverly, the company has acquired a number of domains relating to Broadway theatre tickets, which cater for both British and American clients.

Aside from owning both Theater.com and Theatre.com, the company also owns the plural Theaters.com and Theatres.com. All domains forward to the company's ticketing page.


Armor.com and Armour.com

Back in August 2015, Jamie Zoch (@Yofie) broke the news that Armor.com and Armour.com had sold. According to the article, both names were owned by a Minneapolis-based business. At the time, the most likely buyer was thought to be sports company Under Armor.

However, the names ended up with cloud security company Armor that was founded in 2009 and has received over $149 million worth of funding to date. The company uses Armor.com as their main domain, with Armour.com forwarding to the site.


Harbor.com and Harbour.com

This is a move that NamePros wrote about in early 2018. Back in November 2017, our DomainIQ detection tools found that the Harbor.com domain had moved under privacy protection, which can signify a sale or an agreement of some sort.

In February 2018, crypto securities company Harbor started to use the domain. The company, headed by Bob Remeika, announced a $10 million funding round at the start of February, coinciding with the company's site launch.

As well as getting the Harbor.com domain, Harbor acquired Harbour.com, which was previously listed for sale on Sedo.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Great article! Now you can ad Joe Styler's ticket comapny to this list with TheaterTickets.com and TheatreTickets.com.
 
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Neighbor.com and Neighbour.com
 
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Hmm, sounds like a familiar topic (n)
 
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Some good examples of smart (but also logi- / tactical) moves regarding meaningful domain - usages.
 
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Nice article.

The English spelling is always the correct way.....no offense to the yanks. But we made the words, they changed them :ROFL::ROFL::ROFL:

Patriotic Englishman (y)

On the domain front, if you're truly an international brand or want to be then you cannot ignore the US spelling - the market is far to big.
 
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I checked out gray.com and grey.com, the former owner by an engineering/construction company, the later owned by an advertising company.
 
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Trying to figure out what the dislike is all about (n)

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