Well here’s an interesting one. The new Avengers movie revealed its official title yesterday, Avengers:Endgame, and yes, someone scooped up the matching .COMs, AvengersEndGame.com and AvengersEndGameMovie.com. The owner instantly took to Twitter to announce that he actually didn’t want the domains and would happily trade them for tickets to the premier.
As many people know, technically this is cybersquatting since Avengers is Trademarked so if the movie studios really wanted to sock it to him they could UDRP it. Of course, I don’t think the studio would do that because hey, seems like a nice guy and he’s not holding the domains hostage for a million dollars, he just wants to go to a premier.
That being said, it will be interesting to see if more people go out and register popular movie titles and attempt to trade them for cool perks in the future. More than anything I’m surprised that movie studios don’t register these domains in advance. Sure, if they’re trying to keep the name a secret it could hint at the new name if the domain is registered, but they could always register a few minutes before they announce.
To me this either shows that movie studios aren’t that concerned about getting the exact-match domain of their movie, or at least this case they didn’t. What do you think? Should studios care more about domains or does it not really matter given all the other marketing tools they leverage?
I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!
