According to DomainTools, there are nearly one hundred million active domains as of Feb., 2008.
As the web continues to grow, new sites are created every day that can assist a company’s web presence tremendously and help them construct a well-branded and more personal web experience for their visitors. Video sharing web sites and blogs are just a couple types of sites that can be used strategically to enhance web traffic and engage visitors. On the other hand, in our current “I-me-my” era of customization, many businesses seek out sole branding marketing solutions and are turned off by using a web site or tool that might already have competitors brands associated with it. For instance, the most popular of video sharing web sites, YouTube, allows one to link to specific video content, but will also display other videos that are relevant to the content subject matter. This would allow a consumer to potentially view a video uploaded by a competitor and be persuaded to take their business elsewhere.
A company that is weary of its competition always has the option of hosting their video on their own servers, only allowing it to be viewed on their web site. Or, they could take advantage of the 100+ million YouTube hits a day and remain confident that their professionally produced video segment will engage their consumers and increase traffic back to their company’s web site.
Taking advantage of the sea of tools on the web is like the innovative sampling that took place on the Beastie Boys Paul’s Boutique album released in the late 80’s. Selected in numerous publications as one of the top 100 albums of all time, Paul’s Boutique was produced by the Dust Brothers whose extensive use of sampling bits of published music helped establish multi-layered music sampling as an art in itself. In total, 105 songs are sampled on the album, including 24 individual samples on the last track alone. Paul’s Boutique was a painting with sound just as the art of web presence is like painting with all things branded.
—Mike Endicott
