According to TechCrunch, ShareMyPlaylists.com which allows Spotify users to upload and share their Spotify playlists with other users has changed their domain name to Playlists.net.
ShareMyPlaylists.com was launched in March 2009.
While many believe its a .com world, others see that its all about branding and truncation which Mr. Frager chats about daily on his blog.
“The main difference in how people use the site is we’re seeing more people using us purely for music discovery, which we’re fine with by the way,” Playlists.net founder and CEO Kieron Donoghue told me in an email. “Hence the name change, to reflect this.””
For those that believe building out anything other than a .com will lead to a certainly amount of traffic being diverted to the.com, the move from the longer .com to the shorter .com is especially risky since the domain name Playlists.com, goes to another site in which people can share their playlists and therefore basically offers the same type of service.
It will only get more interesting with new TLDs:
@Berkens,
I don’t mean to be constantly retorting on your posts, but it’s necessary for me to inquire what you understand this news to mean.
We know that Overstock.com was re-branded from a well known name, to O.co, and we know, in the domain community that Overstock.com did a thorough of a job as any one could in that experiment. And we also know the result: they claimed that they were losing traffic in 40 to 60 percentile to O.com. By the way, that was the conventional wisdom, stars in our industry, such as Rick Schwartz have always said that traffic leakage would occur when one abandons the dot com for other extensions. The Overstock.com experiment made it scientific.
So, my question to you is what is Playlist.net going to do differently to prevent traffic leakage to Playlists.com? Or do we have to watch it unfold first to make a call? Please answer succinctly. What is your own opinion, aside from reporting what they told you, based on your own experience, is it a good idea? Do you now recommend for dot com owners to rebrand to shorter dot nets? If you do, why? If you don’t, why? Thank you.
I’m not sure you can compare O.co’s “failed marketing experiment” with this new branding (using a new URL). The target market of the first is broad (multi-generational), and therefore a high percentage of current/potential customers still continue to use Google as a discovery tool, whereas sharemyplaylists.com ( a good URL, albeit a bit long) lacks “the cool” factor for its targeted youth (millenial) market, which likes to tap quick on their smartphones. They’d prefer mylist.com, playlist.com, myplaylist(s).com, or playli.st (owned by the Division of large entity), or playlist.fm, playlist.am. (Disclaimer: I may own some of those, so I may be biased)
Overstock spent millions on advertising on TV
The also did a double rebrand at the same time.
Everyone wants to point out to the .CO part but they seem to forget the also went from overstock to O
Overstock was already branded and has a meaning in the US
O can mean a lot of things.
So they re-branded from overstock.com to o.co
It will lose traffic to the .com
I would have found a short/catchy 5-6 letter .com to rebrand with (while having the longer already established .com redirect to it). They can be found for cheap or even hand reg, if you are creative enough.
It be like Facebook going with friends.net all of a sudden…if friends.com was already another established social networking site.
Competition in business is already hard enough…why give the other guy help to compete against you?
The company should apply .list extension.
And brand it to Play.list
@Berkens,
With all due respect, your comment was non-responsive…