If you are like most business owners, the only part of the title of this article that caught your attention was XXX. But, if you own a trademark, especially one that is well-known, you should be more interested in knowing about the deadline that is looming.
This year, those in the adult entertainment industry will be
able to secure website addresses that end in .XXX. Some people are predicting this will be the most popular domain name suffix since .com. While the .XXX suffix is only for use in the adult entertainment industry, it potentially has a significant impact on other brand owners.
The adult entertainment industry is notorious for choosing web addresses that capitalize on the web traffic of others. Porn sites often utilize domain names that are common misspellings of popular websites so that users who are looking for a product or service accidently end up on the adult site. I once had a client who was a well-known motivational speaker. His website address was his last name. Unfortunately, his last name could easily be spelled two different ways. He owned hislastname.com but an adult website purchased hislastnames.com. When he appeared at speaking engagements and members of his audience typed his name into the address bar of their web browser, they sometimes misspelled it and ended up at the porn site. Needless to say, this was not good for his business.
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