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Trends in domain names used to advertise movies, 2000-2010
Download the Full ArticleFor many, January and February mean snow, cold and the winter doldrums. But for movie fans, it means something much more exciting: movie awards season. As we move from the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards, and get ready for the Academy Awards, moviegoers will be trying to find out more about the major award winners and figure out which frontrunners they should finally get around to seeing.
Official websites are great sources of information and entertainment for movie fans. They serve as one-stop shops for cast, crew and production information; trailers and other video clips; theatrical and DVD release dates; links to purchase merchandise; and even downloads of soundtracks, wall papers or interactive applications. Unfortunately, for the most part, there is no uniformity across the movie industry in terms of which domain names are used to host these websites so movie fans often have to do some hunting online. Whereas businesses in other industries have made it easy for consumers to predict where to find official content – Nike, for example, owns Nike.com, NikeShoes.com and NikeSoccer.com, among others, and points them to its homepage, its online apparel store and its soccer web pages, respectively – film studios and distributors do not use a common naming system for a variety of reasons. In an industry that has been ravaged by counterfeits, most of which are sold online, and whose business model is completely different than it was a decade ago, one would assume that being found where its audience attempts to find legitimate content online would be of the utmost importance. FairWinds Partners has undertaken a study to examine trends in how film studios and their distribution partners use domain names to promote movies.
FairWinds examined which domain names were advertised in the trailers and on posters for a sample of films from 2000 to 2010. We initially predicted that we would see increasing levels of normalization over the years; in other words, we expected that the movies released more recently would have similarly structured domains. Unfortunately, the lack of normalization that our study revealed shows that the movie industry still has a substantial opportunity in front of them to effectively use domain names to drive traffic to official movie sites.
