PersonalizationMall Buys Personalization.com Domain

2005-04-20 - Chicago, IL, USA: Personalized gift products vendor PersonalizationMall.com has finalized the purchase of the domain name Personalization.com for an undisclosed amount. The move was intended to strengthen the company's presence in the personalized gift market.

PersonalizationMall.com is located in Chicago, Illinois and reported over $6,000,000 in sales in 2004. Some of the company's advertisements appear on this website.

Personalization.com is currently being redirected to the company's PersonalizationMall.com website. Future plans for the domain name have not yet been released. "Personalization.com is a generic, one word domain name that delivers a substantial amount of type-in traffic on its own. We're discussing a number of potential future uses for Personalization.com." said Alan Townsend, Marketing Manager at PersonalizationMall.com.

This purchase may provide an illustration of the advantage to be gained from using a generic term domain. PersonalizationMall.com already ranks in the top ten on Google and Yahoo for the search term 'personalization'. If the domain name was purchased purely for its ranking power, it suggests that a major advantage applies to holding a generic term domain name. The purchase could pave the way towards a change of brand name from PersonalizationMall.com to 'Personalization.com'.

Almost all noun, verb and adjective words in the English language are registered as .com domains. In many cases, the domains are 'parked', that is, they are not being used for an actual website by their owner. There is an active market in the 're-sale' of existing registered domains. The registering of a domain name that is not a registered trademark is a legitimate activity. It is not comparable to 'cyber squatting', where someone registers a trademarked word and then attempts to sell it to the trademark owner at an inflated price.