MySpace.ca, Anyone?

I don’t think Ali Atif is the actual registrant of the domain. If you look closely at the whois information for myspace.ca, you’ll see a note about the domain owner using a private registration service.

The Wayback Machine Archive at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://myspace.ca shows that there was actually nothing on the site until quite recently. So clearly the owner is squatting on the domain. But I think as long as the domain was registered before the real Myspace registered their trademark in Canada, there won’t be a forced transfer.

I actually do not believe that Mr. Murdoch is interested in acquiring myspace.ca. In addition, I strongly disagree with Rihan about her squatting comment.

1) I’ll address the squatting first. Squatting is when someone registers a domain of a ‘known’ trademark in order to make profit out of its traffic.

As we all know, myspace.com came into fame end of 2004. Who heard about that website before?

To make my point, please check this Alexa traffic snapshot of myspace.com over last 6 years (Click on the ‘max’ tab):

http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=myspace.com/&url=myspace.com/

You will note that the myspace.com traffic was negligible up till mid 2004.

The domain myspace.ca was registered back in 2000 close to 4 years before myspace.com was anything to talk about. Note also in this regard how myspace.us was registered on June 2004 again making it undeniable that ‘myspace’ was not really indicative of any hot web property prior to 2004. Based on that fact alone, I can state with 100% certainty that there is NO squatting in the case of myspace.ca.

The following only confirms the above:

a) the myspace.ca website has been active since 2002 and has hundreds of pages indexed by the search engines. It has lots of intelligent content. There are personal poems, travelogues and movie reviews. Check for example the ‘Inside man’ review. There is no BS makebelieve content here but rather a sophisticated in depth review.

b) I do not see how the owner of myspace.ca is making profit from that website. There are no ads, no Adsense, no paid links, no product promotion. All I see is a personal site with personal content.

If you want to see classic squatting take a look at youtube.ca, myspace.us, and facebook.ca. None of these has any content and all the domains either are profiting from PPC links or forward to a competing website. Furhermore, all urls were registered between June 2004 and December 2005. The combo of post fame registration, no content, and profit is the classic definition of squatting.

2) I do not believe Mr. Murdoch has any interest in myspace.ca based on the fact that the ‘international links’ at myspace.com lists the various urls of their international sites. All are of the form xx.myspace.com. The company has already advertsised and branded these links and so that to me is enough proof that myspace.com has no interest in acquiring any of the country myspace domains including myspace.ca. As a matter of fact, if they had such interest, they would have gone after myspace.us, something that is very simple to do since it’s a straight forward squatting case. It has not done so as expected. It simply has no interest in the country domains including myspace.ca.

Mark