The Mag Tag

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2000 by Debra Judge Silber

Knowing the right name will get you in the door. An old concept, maybe, but with a new twist for the Internet, where a name signifies not only who you are, but where you can be found.

A reader out for a spin on the web types in smartmoney.com, and up pops Smart Money's online version. Type in time.com, and there's Time online. But if she types in redbook.com, she's at a medical text company; if he types in maxim.com, he's at a pharmaceutical manufacturer in San Diego.

Coming too late to the Net--and not willing to pay the price--a number of publishers launching online have resorted to the "mag tag" in creating their online identity. By adding the suffix -mag (or occasionally, online or -net) to their titles, publishers can sidestep the issue--and avoid paying the ransom--when their name is already someone else's registered domain. The question is, does the mag-tag confuse readers who've put down the magazine to pick up the mouse?

It does for a few, at least. Employees at Maxim Pharmaceuticals of San Diego, California, are amused when e-mails intended for Dennis Publishing's Maxim--wives canceling their husband's subscriptions, for instance--show up among the site's more sober correspondence from investors, patients and doctors interested in clinical trials of the company's cancer treatments. While Dale Sander, the drug company's chief financial officer, estimates only about three out of every 100 e-mails his company receives is intended for Dennis' beer-and-babes bible, even these few make him wonder, "It seems a little unusual that someone can navigate through a whole site and still think it's Maxim magazine," he says.

It's not that Maxim didn't try to avoid this. But maxim.com was already taken when the magazine went trolling for a domain name in 1996-- prior even to launching its print magazine--and instead scooped up maximmag.com, according to Dennis group creative director Keith Blanchard. A later overture to Maxim Pharmaceuticals, which had in the interim purchased the maxim.com domain from its previous owner, was rebuffed. "We made an initial inquiry, and they weren't interested in selling the name," says Blanchard. "We dropped it right there. We weren't prepared to go to the mat for it."

A wrestling match may well have ensued, for the drug company has no interest in giving up the name. "It's really not a matter of price," says Maxim Pharmaceuticals' Sander. "The domain name is our name, and it's very important that we use it."

The truth is, out of the more than eight million domain names registered since 1993 by Network Solutions Inc., by far the largest Internet domain registrar, only 9,000 have been the subject of formal disputes. While the rate at which domain names are being zapped up is still accelerating--five million were added in 1999 alone-- registrants have learned to be creative--and sometimes, to settle. "We like to say there's a lot of room left in dot.com," says NSI spokeswoman Cheryl Regan. And beginning this. year, the option of increasing a domain name from 26 characters to 67 presents even more room for creativity: Conceivably, then, maximmag.com could be Maximsexsportsgeargadgetsclothesfitness.com.

Who wins in the domain-name game is generally a matter of who gets there first. In many cases, magazines staked their claims early, before the rush and just ahead of the time when speculation in domain names became a cottage industry. Michael Dubester, president of Times Mirror Interzines from 1998 through 1999 and now president of Sporting News Online, says that most Times Mirror sites established themselves online early enough in the game that the URIs were available. "Somebody," he says, "had the foresight way before my time to put up some sort of working site. And it wasn't a landgrab back then."

But when Times Mirror wanted snowboarding.com for its Transworld Snowboarding title in 1998, it found the URL was already registered by a snowboarding instructor. Negotiations for the site didn't last long. "He wanted like hundreds of thousands of dollars," Dubester recalls. "It was an absolute non-starter."

Although Dubester presumes some publishers will pay top dollar for a name, in his view the big bucks should be used to produce a better product. "For all I know, there are people who will buy up a name because it's an integral part of their strategy, but I'd rather spend the money on the site," he says.

Thus, what might have been snowboarding.com is twsnow.com. "My point of view is to promote what you have. If we're going to use our good offices and our marketing on twsnow.com, we're going to get people coming to twsnow.com," Dubester says. "If you've done your promotion right, people will find you.

URLS: HOW INTUITIVE?

In most cases, readers are sophisticated enough online to find what they're looking for, agrees Marion Maneker, editorial director of New York Magazine's Web site, newyorkmag.com. "I don't really think it's a problem, because there are so many online versions that use the name, mag at the end and then dot.com, which in some ways has almost become a standard. And people have become fairly used to the fact that URIs are not always intuitive."