20th Century Fox really is rebranding to 21st Century Fox — Hmm… Perhaps

Latest domain registrations suggest movie studio might rebrand to 21st Century Fox.

The prior week I wrote regarding how movie studio 20th Century Fox had registered domains to protect itself for the next millennium: It registered domains from 22ndcenturyfox.com up to 29thcenturyfox.com.

At the time I figured it was just an over-the-top defensive domain registration campaign.

But now that more domain registrations have come to light, I’d up the odds that 20th Century Fox is working on a rebrand to 21st Century Fox.

Among the fresh domain registrations are www21CenturyFox.com and www21stCenturyFox.com.

www typos that don’t have the dot between the three w’s and the main domain are common, but the only time I’ve seen firms register such domains is if they plan on using the correct version of the domain. The only reason these typos get any traffic is if someone is promoting the actual, non-typo domain name. So if you’re going to protect one, that likely means you’ll promote the associated correct URL.

Need more evidence? The firm even went so far as to register this same typo in .info, www21CenturyFox.info.

It also didn’t bother to register these typos for variations of “22CenturyFox”, which it wouldn’t use for a while.

Furthermore, it registered many ccTLDs of the 21st Century Fox name: 21stcenturyfox.cn, 21stcenturyfox.in, and 21stcenturyfox.jp. But it did not register the 22nd version of these ccTLDs.

Add to that multiple hyphen variations of non .com domains like twenty-firstcenturyfox.org, twentyfirst-centuryfox.org, and twentyfirstcentury-fox.org, and I’d say you have the most overzealous defensive registration campaign in history or the firm is getting ready to rebrand to 21st Century Fox.

The firm doesn’t even own TwentiethCentury-Fox.org. Why would you register a domain with 21st but not your actual brand 20th?

The only other possible explanation is that people by now think 20th Century Fox is 21st Century Fox, so they’re trying to protect everything related to that.

It definitely looks like something is going on…