uTube.com manufacturing company website shut down after inundation with misdirected visitors
A fairly small Ohio-based manufacturing company, the Univeral Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation, has seen visits to its website utube.com increase rapidly over the past week or so, as news broke of the Google/YouTube merger.
They’d already been getting a steady flow of visitors who didn’t know how to spell YouTube, but as the rumours and then the announcement came, people who hadn’t heard of YouTube before mistakenly typed in uTube.com iinstead of YouTube.com. An easy mistake given the web’s love affair with ‘u’ and ‘4’ in place of the full words.
USA Today reported that their website was inaccessible for most of the week as millions of people visited looking for the video site. It became the most popular (or at least the most visited) manufacturing site in August with 68m hits, and shut down the weekend before Google announced the buyout.
Despite the fact that the company advertises its website to overseas customers using the domain name, they are planning to get a new domain name. Presumably it’s cheaper in the long run to find a name not associated with the video giant.
I wonder what they’ll do with uTube.com? They could make some serious cash from it.
Via Search Engine Journal
