This week there’s been a lot of talk about Topix.net purchasing the domain topix.com for $1 million in order for them to have the ‘proper’ url, and for them to grab the traffic that they were missing as people, real or imagined, automatically type .com for every url. People have discussed this backwards and forwards, talking about whether this was a good deal, or a bad deal, whether they should have kept the .net as their main domain and redirected the .com over there, or whether we should all just wait a month and see if everything sorts itself out (the crux is that since the shift to the .com domain, they’ve had a drop in traffic / rankings). But this wasn’t the only big domain purchasing story this week…

One blog reported on Tate & Lyle, and Johnson & Johnson, the co-developers of the artificial sweetner Splenda, purchasing 200-300 negative domain names, such as the lovely splendaisnotsafe.com, the divine victimsofsplenda.info, and the succinct splendapoison.org. It’s not a bad idea to attempt to control the story by taking domains off the shelf, but if they really expect that someone would purchase splendatoxicitycenter.com, then I’ve got to really wonder whether they know something about Splenda that we all should know…

So what’s the commonality here? Well, both companies have gone out and purchased domains that they think should be under their control in order for them to succeed in business. The lesson is that while you can you should get as many permutations of, at least, your company name as you can, and if there’s a chance that one of your products may have a particular defect that you’re aware of, maybe you should look into controlling that story by buying those domains too. Maybe another lesson is that you should stick with real sugar…