SportsRantz fixes its “z” problem

Online sports fan site purchases a key domain name for its branding.

Now that I’m back from vacation I’m compiling the end user sales note for the past two weeks.

As I was researching the purchase of SportsRants.com for $1,415 on Afternic by SportsRantz.com, I found that the buyer had posted a blog entry regarding why he bought the domain.

Most domainers know why by now: using a ‘z’ instead of ‘s’ in the domain name was sure to cause problems. It’s called the radio test. If someone hears the domain name over the radio, would they be able to spell it?

But it’s great when an end user explains this in his own words. Here’s what SportsRantz CEO Anthony DiMoro had to say regarding it in a post titled “Forget the Z!”:

Since I launched the SportsRantz website in early 2011, we would from time to time hear that people were often confused with the “Z” at the end of our name. Sometimes, people would naturally put in “SportsRants.com” and end up on the “dead” site. You can imagine that most people would assume we were a dead site ourselves.

Putting a “Z” at the end of our name has been a somewhat challenging branding process. Some of you will notice that most of our radio ads and show openers at SportsRantz Radio usually come with the line “that’s SportsRantz….with a Z“. Needless to say it’s been a bit daunting to brand and I know that people sometimes confuse SportsRantz with SportsRants, especially when hearing regarding our site via word of mouth.

Luckily for DiMoro he was able to acquire the domain name at a very reasonable cost. Congrats to SportsRantz on the buyout.