#1 GoDaddy.com - Home of the $1.99 domain name

This is not an UP review!

I was sitting in the theater, waiting for UP to start (it turned out to be an excellent movie... one of my favorite Pixar's) and watched the local ads play out on screen. I had a couple of thoughts roll by my head as I sat there in the dark.

  • I noticed at least one ad... a random eye doctor, who didn't advertise a URL. Considering how much they paid for that spot, I can only assume they either don't have a website or don't like to advertise that they do. How many small businesses are in the same boat?

  • A captive audience is great, but if there's no call to action, the ad will have a very low conversion into new customers. What would be really cool is to have a number people are asked to text or a poll question or something while they are waiting. Then you've got them hooked.

  • Wow, there are a lot of local businesses advertising. I live in a fairly small suburb of Tampa, so I figured I'd see mostly Tampa ads. Nope. They were all local to the suburb. I've got to tap that market!

  • It's really sad how pathetically bad most people's website URLs are. There's absolutely no chance anyone will remember their abbreviations, their .net extension or their 30 character .com because that's all that was available to register. Seeing ad after ad of local businesses with impossible to remember URLs puts ideas in one's head about how to service those businesses with better URLs and how to get users to my geo domains. Hmmm....

  • Showing ad after ad after ad starts to lead to viewer fatigue. Websites (this one included) are horrible about that. Sure, we look at heat maps and monitor click-thru rates. We swap ads and we get some conversions... but where's the innovation in ad display online? How big of a splash can you make to get the user's attention without making them annoyed? Is a little annoyed a bad thing?


I know there's a code of domainers that says "If it's working don't tell anyone else", but if you know of anything cool in the ad space, I'd be all ears.

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