With all the Charlie Sheen eruptions in the news of late, I thought I’d look at the state of the most valuable rendition of Charlie’s name in Internet terms: CharlieSheen.com. It turned out to be a far gnarlier situation than imagined. CharlieSheen.com is on drugs. Here are five reasons why the domain in its current state, is far from winning:
1. CharlieSheen.com is Down
Celebrity status aside, one of the most important aspects of a winning website starts with, well, being able to view it. CharlieSheen.com displays the default ”404 page not found” page in any browser that requests the page. 404 is the http status code that occurs when a website is aka losing, aka not winning. 100% down time means no train wreck to watch. Listen and hear it crying out for web hosting.
2. Charlie Sheen doesn’t own CharlieSheen.com
According to the current whois record, a Hot Rods company in Canada owns Charlie Sheen’s namesake .com. March 19, 1997 was a good day for the owner of CharlieSheen.com, but not for Sheen. Charlie starred in no less than five films that year. There probably wasn’t a lot of time for dealing with Network Solutions, the one and only domain registrar at the time. Now, even CharlieSheen.info is taken. But, why hasn’t Sheen bought CharlieSheen.com instead of spending on some of the other things we hear about? CharlieSheen.com could be a winning domain if only it were in Sheen’s hands.
3. Not Indexed by Google
How much free organic search traffic do you think Google would send Charlie Sheen’s site if it had even one page indexed? How many natural backlinks would Sheen’s domain receive? How many of the 368,000 Googlers in the image below who typed “Charlie Sheen” into the search field would click through to the exact match .com domain? Getting indexed would be a quick and easy win for this celebrity, no doubt.
4. No Content
Perhaps worse than a content farm and certainly more tragic is the conspicuous absence of web content on CharlieSheen.com. Whatever your opinion about Charlie Sheen, everyone agrees that he is a human viral content generating machine. Imagine the content that could fill the pages of a CharlieSheen.com curated by the Sheen.
5. Not Monetized
The Google AdWords Keyword Tool suggests some words and their corresponding exact match traffic that CharlieSheen.com could potentially receive. How many of those 368,000 Googlers who typed “Charlie Sheen” into the search field would click through to the exact match .com domain? Would fans buy Charlie Sheen T-Shirts and DVDs? Would the consume Charlie Sheen news from the horses mouth?
And what about monetizing traffic from social media? A celebrity with 3 million Twitter followers and over half a million Facebook likes should be able to seriously bring it.
Let it be known that I am not a fan of Charlie Sheen’s domain strategy. But, does he really need CharlieSheen.com? There may come a point where celebrity brands can transcend the need for exact match domains that trolls like us to fawn over.
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