On March 31, Baidu Youa announced its closure, which meant that Baidu’s C2C attempt failed. I specifically checked that the date was not yet April 1st before I dared to confirm it. There is no God on the Internet. Big guys at any level have made mistakes. There are many reasons for failure. Here I will discuss their brands and domain names.
Some big names on the Internet, after reaching a certain level, are very sensitive to the length of domain names (why it is said to be a few, will be explained in detail in the second half). They feel that only short domain names can show the strength of the company, so they excessively pursue short domain names when choosing domain names. , would rather give up some good brands with clear meanings and pursue short names. In fact, when Baidu was doing C2C, there were many good names to choose from, but it chose youa.com because of its pursuit of shortcomings. The domain name only has 4 letters, which is indeed very short, but the meaning of the Chinese brand it corresponds to is "yes", which is awkward. This time Youah is out of business. I read a lot of comments from netizens, and they all mentioned their disgust and confusion about the name of the site. It can be seen that the name is a failure.
A more classic joke is A and B meeting on the street:
A: The clothes are nice. Where did you buy them?
B: Online, yes!
A: I know it is available online. Which website is it specifically?
B: Yes!
A: I know there is, but where is it?
B: Baidu has it!
B: I know it can be found on Baidu, so what should I search on Baidu?
A: ..... Speechless, forget it, just go to Taobao and buy it.
B: I told you earlier
This communication ended in failure. This example is constantly happening in real life. You can imagine how many users who originally belonged to you have been lost. Baidu can guide users through its own search engine, but it cannot influence the users' own words. Through the rapid development of SNS and Weibo, we can know that communication among netizens plays a vital role in the popularity of websites. Can you imagine how a website's brand can develop and grow if it is not communicable? Therefore, for a website, it is most important to position a brand that is easy to remember and understand. The meaning of the domain name is far more important than the length.
I remember a few years ago, there was a big discussion in the domain name community about whether the four-letter domain name was too long and whether it was a spam domain name. I did not participate in the debate because I had already used the 10-letter four-letter domain name to build a website and made money. When it comes to N pots of gold, let practice test the truth. Why bother talking on paper? Do you think domain names that can earn real money are considered garbage? As the same saying goes, meaning is king. Domain names and brands are for netizens to remember. If your domain name is used as a street billboard, can people passing by know what the website does at a glance and remember the domain name? If it can, then it is a good domain name, regardless of its length. If you cannot remember or clarify your business, then the advertising money will be wasted and it will be a failed domain name.
After talking about Baidu, I have to mention Shanda Ge Binbin, who is currently in the limelight. He announced that he has received 2 billion yuan of investment, and the first batch of 200 million funds has been received, and he will enter the e-commerce C2C field. Its goal is to "catch up with Taobao in scale within one year, reach the second place in the country, and go public in three years." This is very similar to Youah’s original slogan of surpassing Taobao. Seeing Youah now, we can’t help but worry about his future. So is it possible? I think that because the emergence of new tools such as SNS and Weibo has changed the speed and scale of information dissemination, it is indeed possible to do in a very short time what it took the Internet many years to accomplish a few years ago. But the premise is that we must learn from the experience of failure, make fewer mistakes, and come up with more unique tricks, so that we can have a chance.
I had a chat with Mr. Ge yesterday, and now he is having a headache about choosing a name. He thinks that my e-commerce website - Ai Shopping www.aigouwu.com is good, but because it is 7 letters long, it is not easy to acquire because the investor is the same as Baidu. He is also a lover of short domain names, and the length requirement is 5 characters. In this way, the choice is too small, which means that the website's brand will be discounted due to the domain name. I even considered a 4-digit double spelling that was completely inconsistent with the website's positioning, but finally gave up because it felt inappropriate. It can be seen that Internet giants are not necessarily omnipotent, and they also have blind spots that they are concerned about. They may be experts in capital operation, website operation, and market positioning, but they do not know much about domain names. I think that the domain name is just a symbol, as long as it is short, but I don’t know that the domain name determines the brand of the website and determines the future dissemination. When there is a conflict between the brand and the length of the domain name, the good brand should be the first choice.
I said: Is seven letters very long? For example, some of the most famous websites in the world have seven or eight letters, which does not affect their dissemination. Jack Ma only had RMB 500,000 when he started his business, but he was willing to spend RMB 80,000 to acquire alibaba.com. If you wanted to be short, there were too many short domain names to choose from in 1999. Why did Jack Ma choose a 7-letter domain name? It can be seen that With his courage and deep understanding of the brand, it seems that Alibaba now has 7 letters or even 4 spellings, but it is a good brand that people, including businessmen who are not familiar with the Internet, can never forget.
Finally, I said to him: It doesn’t matter whether I buy my website or not. After all, my own operating income is also good. However, no matter which domain name you decide to use, you must make an assumption. If you run TV ads in the future, it will only take 1 second. Let the audience remember the website address and an advertising slogan, and the website address and the advertising slogan should be closely related. For example: Love shopping? Just love shopping! Or: Love shopping, let you fall in love with shopping! Such a sentence will make people remember, because the cost of TV advertising is very expensive, one or two seconds may cost one or two hundred million, it must be Let the audience know what you do and remember your URL in the shortest possible time without any ambiguity.
Before making a decision, you can do this test. Organize 1,000 people, make a 1-2 second TV commercial, show it to these people, and count how many of the 1,000 people can remember and tell what the website is about after watching it. of. I think if you want to make a top-notch website, you need more than 950 people to answer it correctly to be considered successful. This test idea is also welcome to use by major websites. Building a website is building a brand. It is worthwhile to spend some functions on brand selection, especially for large websites.
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