UTube Sues YouTube

Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp. is a small manufacturer with 17 employees in Ohio. In August, its website had 68 million hits, which means a heckuva lot of people know about the company. The problem, though, is few of those visitors meant to go to that website. They wanted YouTube.com, the video site, but typed in Utube.com, the site of Universal Tube. Now, UTube is suing YouTube. This is one David should lose to Goliath because David doesn't see his own advantage in this situation.

Universal Tube’s boss fellow Ralph Girkins, told the Associated Press, “We’ve had to move our site five times in an effort to stay ahead of the YouTube.com visitors.” That is an inconvenience, and what’s worse, the more hits a site has after a certain level, the more one must pay for having the site hosted. UTube.com’s finances are at risk.

Now, Mr. Girkins thinks that because UTube.com predates YouTube.com by a decade, the video site (recently purchased by Google, which provides the ads seen to the right of this column) is somehow doing his company wrong. He wants the YouTube.com domain abandoned (not bloody likely, Sunshine), or he wants to be paid damages to allow him to find another domain name. What he is missing here is an enormous opportunity.

With 68 million accidental viewers, if even 1/10,000th of them have any interest in tubing or pipe, he’s got almost 7,000 potential customers. In addition, he’s got more than one-fifth the population of the US looking at his site. He ought to be selling ad space on his homepage. Quite what his hosting costs are one can’t say, but defraying that with ad revenue shouldn’t be hard.

Mr. Girkins may be playing a very deep game here, being a big enough pain that YouTube throws some money at him to make him go away. Or he may genuinely believe that he has the right to UTube, YouTube, YewTube, YooTube and even EweToob. But he is making a rather common business mistake – seeing a problem where there is an opportunity.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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