discuss About.com Rebrands to DotDash.com ...A Good Move?

[DaveX]

Why would they do that? If you go to About.com you are redirected to the new name DotDash.com...

"About.com -- the 20-year-old general interest site with hundreds of thousands of articles about everything from "The right way to handwash clothes" to "What to do if you hate your in-laws" -- has a new mandate, and a new name to to go with it.

The New York-based, IAC-owned company, which actually began as MiningCo.com, is now "Dotdash," a nod to the company's history of having a "dot" in its previous names and logos, and a "dash" meant to represent what comes next, said CEO Neil Vogel. The dot and dash also represent the letter "A" in Morse code."

Source: http://adage.com/article/tech/a-dotdash/308884/

I have no idea why they would go from About.com to DotDash.com. What does everyone else think?

 

[DaveX]

What makes DotDash.com so Brandable than About.com?
That's Weird!

Like I said...They could have gone from About to just Out.

 

[offthehandle]

Remember their famous mantra "Do no evil"? Well, they morphed from that into the epitome of evil. Google should have "the devil" as their new logo/mascot.

Here is a mascot thanks to the NYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/opinion/sunday/is-it-time-to-break-up-google.html?_r=0

 

[DaveX]

I completely agree and do remember how it all started.
The major issue for me and for everyone online is that even though there are other "search engines" what really matters is G, even Bing is useless when it comes to the percentage of traffic that most sites get from G. This is beyond dangerous for everyone. G could/and had arbitrarily destroyed many decent honest businesses with a touch of their algorithm tweaks and human interventions etc. No one should have that much power, it's destructive and corrosive.

Like any business, they want to dominate. They want to shred competition, make money and all of that. It's now email, cloud storage, even domain names. Crazy!

Personally, the real threat is their environment that is all inclusive. They are busy developing technology that provides answers and information without ever leaving google.

I make a phone call with my Google Number, then suddenly I'm seeing adsense ads relevant to the conversation I had. That's creepy.

 

[DaveX]

The other day, I accidentally deleted a batch of gmail emails. I mean permanently deleted them. Two or three days later, I located the department at Google that undeletes emails. Within minutes several days of my deleted emails were back in my inbox.

 

[TRY]

What makes DotDash.com so Brandable than About.com?
That's Weird!

Just guessing, maybe they don't want a strong memorable name that diverts attention form their other brands. They probably prefer people to remember the individual vertical brands as stand alone sites. Diversification?

 

[offthehandle]

though there are other "search engines" what really matters is G, G could/and had arbitrarily destroyed many decent honest businesses with a touch of their algorithm tweaks and human interventions etc. No one should have that much power, it's destructive and corrosive.

They are already in the process of rearranging and changing the "NWO" of online business!!! I don't understand why MS doesn't compete effectively, the act like an also-ran imho instead of competing. I don't know enough about their strategy or reasoning. MS used to be dominant as you all know their history. I find it strange. Perhaps shareholder pressure and control over R$D spending, meeting quarter to quarter revenue, etc.

 

[DaveX]

Credit where credit is due. They run an amazing operation. I especially like the "Did you mean to add an attachment?". At first I thought, "What the heck?". Now, it saves me all the time.

 

[Emmy101]

Bad move
Even if they are selling about .com they could have picked a better brand! but maybe they already had the domain long time ago and don't have budget to buy a better one !

 

[MapleDots]

The other day, I accidentally deleted a batch of gmail emails. I mean permanently deleted them. Two or three days later, I located the department at Google that undeletes emails. Within minutes several days of my deleted emails were back in my inbox.

Do you use GSuite or the free version.
I use GSuite with business mail and get great service, I have even called in on occasion.

Hard to believe you get that with the free version unless its a feature google has somewhere.

 

[offthehandle]

Personally, the real threat is their environment that is all inclusive..

The A, FB, also the same- yep these "all inclusive resorts" freely entered by choice due to the "Free stuff" like their mail and are walled off and surrounded in environment we as consumer have to accept their "microphones", "cameras" and "recording devices" with databases of every tiny movement everyone makes. As the article states it's like the "robber baron era". Back to a few controlling the entire market.

 

[DaveX]

Bad move
Even if they are selling about .com they could have picked a better brand! but maybe they already had the domain long time ago and don't have budget to buy a better one !

No, they bought it from a previous owner.

 

[eyedomainous]

Makes sense to me... as Channelization of the web, into multi-channel networks, dominates media -online and off. A classic huge movie theater becomes a Megaplex with 7 screens instead 1, and so on.

DotDash can now monetize About's traffic 6X -with 6 verticals -while escaping About's existing contracts.
And, as each vertical has a unique URL the DotDash brand will likely fade into the background as each vertical gets its legs... and a market value that combined will likely soon be 2 to 3X what About did alone.

 

[DaveX]

We have come a long way in a short time.

I am surprised they arent selling sub domains. Whatever.google.com.

 

[offthehandle]

I went to About dot com, to see. G says 500,000 pages are in "site:domain.com" indexed. So I clip and take the head line exact match and cut and paste into the g search bar. Nothing, no ranking- gone poof. But the good news is a ton of smaller companies pages are ranking instead.

 

[offthehandle]

DotDash can now monetize About's traffic 6X -with 6 verticals -

I hope it works. Trying to split something apart into 6 brand new unknown pieces and make a new brand name for each one with all these new verticals is a challenge. Throw enough money at it, and it will work.

 

[eyedomainous]

^Don't have to throw too much money at it if you all ready own the content.

According to the CEO... they took half of About's medical content and put it on the VeryWell vertical.
The About medical content did 12 million uniques a month, Verywell got 17 million uniques last month.

 

[baseballworld]

I am not sure why they did it but they did it. Would have to ask them why they decided to rebrand the name.

 

[TLA215]

DotDash??? They could've bought a better name from BrandBucket

 

[internext]

They could've bought a better name from BrandBucket

Could hand reg better than that

 

[1Darko]

The other day, I accidentally deleted a batch of gmail emails. I mean permanently deleted them. Two or three days later, I located the department at Google that undeletes emails. Within minutes several days of my deleted emails were back in my inbox.

That only proofs that no data will be ever deleted. It is all stored somewhere "forever" and that is really creepy