I was at my favorite sandwhich shop for lunch today and noticed the domain they listed on the receipt as www.citykitchen.us. I figured they had just registered the only available citykitchen domain and not put the effort into acquiring the .com. My theory is that too many companies are not savvy enough domainers to understand how to go and get the domain. I think that brokering these domains to companies is probably a fairly opportunistic business. The only problem is that as soon as you point out that the company can own there actual domain, they will spend a little time to figure out how to do it themselves rather than paying you to do the work. Questionable trademarks, such as City Kitchen, which could easily pass as a generic, would be easier to acquire ahead of time and flip. While the company would probably win a trademark battle, most small businesses do not know their rights here. I know some people see this as a shady business, but I would not be acquiring to park and receive traffic off their company names. I would be acquiring for them. In the long run, I think the more companies that own their domain name, the better it is for the generic type-in industry.
Of course, when I went to citykitchen.com, they actually owned that name already. Now, they just need to change their reciepts to say the .com rather than the .us. Nobody will remember to go to the .us. From what I can guess from the Whois, they bought the .us in 2004 and just snagged the .com in March 2007. Of course the citykitchen.net is a parked site…they might as well pick up that one too.
