Common Abbreviations & Mister Steamy

The holiday season commonly features many infomercials and other television commercials featuring products to purchase online or over the telephone. There is a lot of remnant television time to purchase at great rates, and we generally see more commercials such as the one for the Prayer Cross discussed on my blog on Sunday.

One commercial I recently saw was for a laundry product called “Mister Steamy,” and of course they use the MisterSteamy.com domain name, which the company registered in March of 2008. Unfortunately for the makers of Mister Steamy, the company didn’t take into account the common abbreviation people in the US use for the word Mister, which is Mr.

It seems that someone in Shanghai, China was able to register the domain name MrSteamy.com in November of 2009, taking advantage of the typo traffic from the infomercials and television commercials. Making matters worse for the laundry product makers is the fact that the PPC advertising for MrSteamy.com is X-Rated, as Mr. Steamy could certainly be a porn name.

One reason I don’t like geodomain names (or other names) that have common abbreviations like Saint and Fort is because many people may abbreviate those using St. or Ft. If you don’t own both versions of the domain name, you risk losing traffic to the alternative. It’s a shame the makers of Mister Steamy didn’t think about this and spend the additional $8/year to register the other domain name, which was available.

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