Saying Hulu changed Internet Tv is not reaching too far out on a limb but changing domaining? When hulu.com first came out it was the personal blog of Amy Hung. Beautiful graphics (sarcasm) and wonderful pictures of childbirth. Little did she know it would be such an important domain in many ways. In August of 2008 she sold the site to NBC. She hadn’t done anything with the site in 4 years so she was probably very happy to get what they paid. Even more excited were the people the owned CVCV.com domains.
For the first time in a major company formed a site based on a cool four letter domain name. It had no references to the parent company, no references to what the site was all about. Just merely a name that was easy to say, easy to spell, and a name that was 4 letters. Sure there was Yahoo and Google and many other names that were meaningless and branded but Hulu started right at the time that CVCV and 4L started to really take off. Without data to prove this, it seems that the start of Hulu made strong CVCV instantly more valuable
Since that time, when all other domains seemed to have fallen in value, the premier CVCV names like Hulu have held steady and even risen. They’ve become harder to acquire and names like JoJo.com have fetched $25,000. So what do you take out of this miscellaneous random post? One, CVCV.com was always a great investment but got that much better with the launch of Hulu. You can actually make a pronounceable word out of 4L versus three letters. Two, try and follow the trends of what the latest new start ups are using for domain names. Follow their lead. My feeling has always been that branding a generic domain name is not for everyone. Having a short rememberable name the at sounds “cool” is an easy brand as well. You just have to figure out what is cool.