Dotweekly Editor Jamie Zoch wrote an interesting article this week about spying on company domain names using DomainTools. The story got me thinking about looking at the name servers of companies like Activision so I could post an article on my other blog, militarygamer.com.
I found something interesting, while doing some research on activision.com. The company has let several of its domain names expire: gameoftheyear.com, thegameoftheyear.com, computergameoftheyear.com, pcgameoftheyear.com, and game-of-the-year.com.
As I pointed out on MilitaryGamer, gameoftheyear.com was first registered in 1999, and now the domain name appears over on the Pending Deletes List provided by Pool.com. Thegameoftheyear.com is still registered to Activision, but the status of the domain is set to ”Redemption Period”, meaning the name has about 30 days before its released by the registrar and either available for public registration or sent to one of the drop-catching services like Pool.
Activision has yet to win a Spike VGA Game of the Year award.
And while one has nothing to do with the other necessarily, had Activision won “Game of the Year”, renewing the domain probably wouldn’t have been overlooked.
According to a rough estimate provided by Compete, the domain gameoftheyear.com does receive a few hundred visitors per month in the latter part of the year.
A look at Archive.org, shows that gameoftheyear.com had a fully developed website online at one point, that was operated by Vivendi Universal Games, which eventually merged with Activision.
You can read more over at the MilitaryGamer blog post.
Anyone who wants to learn more tips and tricks, should pay a visit to DotWeekly. Jamie Zoch the Editor, has been in the domain industry since 2004 and writes helpful guides on domain names.