68 Domain Names: Austin to Houston
Roadtrip shows prevalence of domain names, even for modest town businesses.
If you took a lot of family vacations in the car as a child then you probably recall many road games: finding all 50 license plates, finding the letters of the alphabet on billboards, etc. Today I drove from Austin to Houston and decided to count the number of URLs on billboards and other signs. I know that URLs are on many billboards in sizable cities, but I was particularly interested in the number of URLs I’d see in “the country”.
Austin is regarding a 3 hour drive to Houston. I left my house in West Austin and drove past the Austin airport on Highway 71, which is basically on the edge of Austin. Just following passing the airport I started counting URLs on billboards, store signs, etc. Highway 71 is a rural highway in this area, passing through modest towns like Bastrop and Smithville. I was amazed at the number of modest businesses that had domain names advertised on billboards or their store signs.
There was The Busy B, which advertises the domain TheBusyB.com on at least two billboards. There’s American Fireworks, which uses BigThunderFireworks.com. There was also a sign for free land in Bastrop courtesy of the Bastrop Economic Development Corporation (which proudly advertises BastropEDC.org). Of course there were URLs for bigger firms as well, counting PizzaHut.com and RedCross.org.
Altogether there were 35 URLs from the Austin airport until I hit I10 and headed to Houston. I saw another 33 on I10 until I hit Highway 99 in Houston, when I got tired of counting. That’s 68 domains traveling one way, and I’m sure I missed many of them.
This shows how notable domain names are. Most businesses have them or are getting them. Most fresh businesses will get a domain name and are willing to pay more than the registration price if someone else owns the domain.
Some businesses also need a lesson in domain names. If you’re going to bother putting a domain name on a billboard, it ought to be sizable enough to read. Squinting while driving at 60 miles an hour is not an option.
Perhaps the funniest (or saddest, depending on how you look at it) sign I saw read:
QualityConcrete&
SwimmingPools.com
At first I thought it was a sign for swimmingpools.com, and I was impressed that a modest business owned that. Then I realized the domain was on two lines. Then I realized that it had an ampersand (&) in it, which can’t be used in a domain name. Yes, this person was trying to advertise the URL “qualityconcreteandswimmingpools.com”, but I doubt many people can understand that from his sign.
