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data Domain Data: 66% of Companies Don't Own Their Stock Ticker Symbol as a .COM Domain

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Stock symbols are used globally to identify publicly traded companies that offer their shares on a stock exchange. Depending on the stock exchange in question, these symbols are typically limited to three or four characters. Thanks to the brevity of stock symbols, their associated domain names are often valuable as domains in their own right.

Some companies have gone to great lengths to secure their matching stock symbol. One example that immediately comes to mind is that of Facebook, which uses the NASDAQ symbol "FB". According to Mashable, Facebook paid $8.5 million to acquire the FB.com domain name.

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Recently, George Kirikos (@GeorgeK) challenged his Twitter followers to check the one hundred largest companies by market cap to see which of them owns their matching stock symbol. We decided to take up this challenge, and found some very interesting results.

We took our findings from CNBC's NASDAQ 100 list, which shows a total of one hundred and seven entries, with some companies taking up more than one stock symbol. The NASDAQ 100 lists the largest non-financial companies on the NASDAQ, which we think gives an accurate representation of George's original proposition.

The headline from our research is that just thirty-six of these companies own their stock symbol as a .COM domain, which equates to around 34%. There are some interesting take-aways from this data.

Two-Letter .COM's

There are five companies that own two-letter stock symbols:
  • Micron Technology (MU)
  • CA Inc (CA)
  • Electronic Arts (EA)
  • Facebook (FB)
  • JD.com Inc (JD)
Of these five companies, Micron Technology is the only company not to own their matching two-letter .COM. The rest are actively used by their respective companies. Both Facebook and JD.com Inc acquired their two-letter .COM's relatively recently, with Facebook paying $8.5 million for FB.com in 2011 and Jingdong allegedly paying $5 million in 2014 during its transformation into JD.com.

The domain name MU.com is inactive and is currently registered under privacy at Uniregistry.


Companies That Do Own Their Stock Symbol

From the thirty-six companies that do own their stock symbol as a .COM domain name, we have found that many of the names are forwarding to websites giving investor information for each company. An excellent example of this is Comcast (CMCSA). The domain name CMCSA.com hosts an informative website offering company details to its investors.

PayPal is another company utilising its stock symbol .COM as PYPL.com redirects visitors to the insipid investor.paypal-corp.com website. There are plenty of companies on the NASDAQ 100 that could learn from both Comcast and PayPal.

Tesla (TSLA) acquired Tesla.com in a seemingly cordial transaction, but the company decided to acquire TSLA.com via UDRP in September 2015. TSLA.com currently redirects to Tesla.com.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, has two listings on the NASDAQ 100. Those are Alphabet Class A (GOOGL) and Alphabet Class C (GOOG). Interestingly, the company owns googl.com since it's a common typo of it's main domain name, but it doesn't own goog.com, which has an Alexa ranking of 1.5 million.

Companies That Don't Own Their Stock Symbol

One obvious company that doesn't own its stock symbol as a .COM domain is Apple (AAPL). The technology giant naturally owns apple.com, appl.com and a host of other similar names, but it doesn't own aapl.com. According to DomainIQ, domain investor Garry Chernoff took possession of aapl.com very recently after the domain appeared to expire. It's surprising that Apple never acquired the name.

The domain name adbe.com is a surprising omission from Adobe's portfolio. Not only is it Adobe's stock symbol, but it is also a typo of their main domain name, adobe.com. According to Alexa, the domain name does receive some traffic and is currently owned by an individual from Miami.

Qualcomm's stock symbol is QCOM, but unfortunately they don't own qcom.com or q.com. The single-letter q.com is one of only three single-letter .COM domain names available, and is currently owned by Centurylink.

TripAdvisor (TRIP) missed out on the opportunity to acquire Trip.com after the domain name was acquired by Gogobot as part of a rebranding. The name was previously owned by Expedia (EXPE).

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If you are interested in viewing the full list, researched based on CNBC's list of NASDAQ 100 companies, it is available to download for free below.
 

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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
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Interesting details, thanks.
Another stock symbol .com domain is VRSN.com which redirects to... ...sure, Verisign.com
It reminds me to my domain VRSGN.com which has of course nothing to do with Verisign or any stock symbol, I registered it months ago as a VR related 5l .com domain, i. e. 'Virtual Reality Sport Gaming Network'.
 
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Why should they care about their ticker symbol?

I am surprised Tesla managed to win UDRP on TSLA, unless the owner was stupid to contact them and imply that TSLA stands for Tesla and asked for a fortune for it.
 
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I also own a stock symbol of a big company. It's a premium 4L.com . I contacted them and was only offered $2,500. Where as I have been offer $5,000 at resell.

Receives 600 monthly type in traffic.
 
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Is snapchat now using "SNAP.N" as their stock symbol?
That would be interesting... here
 
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Thanks, so can they claim copyright if we buy such domains??
 
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I also own a stock symbol of a big company. It's a premium 4L.com . I contacted them and was only offered $2,500. Where as I have been offer $5,000 at resell.

Receives 600 monthly type in traffic.


Can't they legally claim it?
 
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Can't they legally claim it?
They don't own the trademark so they can't. It's a tech related company with 1000+ employees.
 
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