The Power of Internet Gripe Sites

Methodology

For this study we looked at the names of companies that compose the Global 500 and Fortune 500 lists that are assembled based on their annual revenue by Time Inc.’s Fortune magazine; the scope of this data set allowed us to look at high level, worldwide trends. We created the list of domains we examined by taking the names of these companies, removing “inc,” “corporation” and other non-core terms, and adding the word “sucks” as a suffix. Since many of the most well recognized brands are for products (example: Marlboro) rather than trade names, we also included Interbrand’s 100 Best Global Brands. We produced a total of 1,058 domain names for our data set, all in the dot-COM TLD. For brands that have multiple words in their moniker, the words were joined without the use of a hyphen (for example, Goldman Sachs became goldmansachssucks.com). If the hyphen is already part of the brand (for example, Coca-Cola), the words in the brand were both hyphenated and unhyphenated to create domains (coca-colasucks.com and cocacolasucks.com).

After compiling the list, we used proprietary FairWinds tools and publicly available Whois resources to gather information on whether each brandsucks domain in our data set was registered and by whom it was registered. We then visited the sites to record what they were being used for at that particular moment in time. In a separate data set, we gathered and examined every UDRP complaint that was filed with World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and National Arbitration Forum (NAF) regarding a “sucks” domain. The data from WIPO and NAF was exhaustive so it includes “sucks” domains beyond the domain sample set we constructed leveraging the Fortune and Interbrand lists. After collecting and sorting all this information, we were able to make observations about general registration and usage trends that surround the brandsucks domain, and draw conclusions about the domain strategies that are being practiced today – as well as what should be avoided.

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