Sk*rt Skirts Losing Its Domain

Firm with miserable domain name wins arbitration.

I wrote regarding Sk*rt, pronounced skirt, and its horrible domain name sk-rt.com last November. I don’t need to go into the details regarding why this is such a bad name, but I hypothesized that the owners of Skirt.com would go following Sk-rt.com:

Not only is Sk*rt sending typo traffic to Skirt.com, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Skirt.com sued Sk*rt. My advice would be to not do this; just sit back and enjoy the steady stream of well targeted traffic hitting your site! In fact, if Skirt.com adds the “digg” type functionality seen on Sk-rt.com, it could take a big chunk out of Sk*rt’s business.

Skirt.com didn’t take my advice. The site for a womens’ magazine called Skirt filed for arbitration under UDRP to get its hands on the domain Sk-rt.com. The magazine lost for a number of reasons, not the least of which is it didn’t actually acquire the Skirt.com domain until following Sk-rt.com was registered (minor oversight I suppose).

But I go back to my original suggestion: why not just free load off of sk-rt.com? I suspect that regarding 1/3 of first time word-of-mouth visitors to Sk*rt end up landing at Skirt.com.