NBC News has acquired full control of MSNBC.com from Microsoft Corp. and is immediately rebranding the site as NBCNews.com.

According to MSNBC.com, the site will “become part of NBC News Digital, a new division led by Vivian Schiller, the former president and chief executive of National Public Radio. Schiller joined NBC News as chief digital officer last year.”

“In the short term, msnbc.com will reflect the homepage of NBCNews.com.”

“Eventually, it will become the address of MSNBC TV, giving MSNBC TV its own dedicated address and ending an arrangement under which the news site shared the MSNBC name with an increasingly commentary-driven channel.”

It should be noted that MSNBC.tv appears to be owned by the channel as it is registered to MSNBC CABLE L.L.C. with an address of 1 MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, New Jersey, but the domain is going to a Godaddy Placeholder full of ads including one for MSNBC.com.  So in essence the company is not only losing the traffic from the domain, which has an Alexa Ranking of 4 Million, but it is actually paying on a pay per click basis to have their own ad appear on a site owned by them.

Crazy (you can see the screenshot below its the last ad on the page and goes to MSN)

Of course the domain should have been at least directed to the .com all these years (it was first registered in February 2002) and sounds like the perfect home for MSNBC TV especially in light of this quote from Charlie Tillinghast, the site’s president and publisher which said that:

“NBC News would benefit from “proper brand alignment between the TV properties and their Web counterparts — NBC News and NBCNews.com, MSNBC cable and msnbc.com and TODAY show and TODAY.com.””

“We’ve had great success combining TV, desktop, mobile and iTV (Internet TV) where the value is greater than the sum of the parts,” he said. “That requires both the brand alignment and product integration that is possible only with a wholly owned unit.”

“For now, visitors should see little difference. “It’ll have a new name and a new URL, but everything else will be the same,” Tillinghast said.”

Yup they should really follow through and integrate  TV, Desktop iTV etc and use the matching .TV domain for its new product MSNBC TV.

MSNBC was a joint venture between Microsoft and NBCUniversal which started 16 years ago.

A couple of other interesting facts from the story:

“MSNBC.com was visited by 49.9 million people in June, according to figures from the online analytics company comScore.”

“TODAY.com drew 17.4 million unique visitors in June, according to comScore — more than a third of overall traffic to the MSNBC Digital Network.”