July 31, 2009 by Matt Thomas
If you’re one of these people that has to register a lot of domain names for your job, or just likes to play the domain name lottery, then you’re likely to have heard about the ‘.cm’ domain name craze, especially if you’ve been anywhere near namejet.com. For the uninitiated, the aforementioned site was, up until today, taking pre orders on .cm domain names. .cm being the official URL ending for Cameroon… Of course.
But why should anybody, other than Cameroonians of course, buy a domain name for Cameroon? Well, it turns out they’re actually quite valuable in terms of search traffic, not because they’re from Cameroon but because ‘.cm’ is awfully close to ‘.com’. Think about it, whilst typing quickly into an address bar one day, I’m willing to bet that you’ve made that mistake at least once.
The practice of taking advantage of these typos first came to light thanks to Mr. Domain name himself, Kevin Ham, who did a deal with the Cameroonian government to instigate a wildcard redirect of all unregistered URLs to a particular site (agoga.com). Ham then sold advertising space on that site. Because it was a redirect, rather than Ham actually buying trademarked URLs, which obviously would have been a breach of copyright, he got a huge amount of traffic from things like Microsoft.cm, facebook.cm, etc.
For a while it was a great scam, sorry, ‘marketing policy,’ but it couldn’t last, in June 2007 either the operator or the Cameroonian government got second thoughts and stopped the redirect and new .cms became unavailable… Until now.
Namejet.com has recently been granted exclusive rights to sell new .cm URLs. However, to prevent a feeding frenzy, the system is working like this; from the 15th to the 31st of this month the URLs were available for pre registration, if more than one person pre registered a URL they were to be offered the option of bidding against the other parties in an online auction – auctions start on the 4th of August. According to Namejet, business has so far been brisk.
So, should you be thinking about loading up on various generic ‘.cms’. Well if you’re a big-ish company it might be an idea to grab your url, just as a redirect to your site, in case people do genuinely make a mistake. However, if you’re reading this and thinking about making your fortune with casino.cm, I would strongly discourage you. Sorry if I’m raining on any parades but the benefit in terms of traffic is likely to be much less than you think, as access to most sites comes via search engines. The only names that would make you any real money would be big brands like facebook, or miss spellings thereof, which could be viewed as cyber-squatting.
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