.ME of course

insure.me

insure.me

The legend of prime dot me land rush auctions, insure.me, won by Timothy Warbington from Arizona after nearly a month of bidding (278 bids were placed in July-August) and lump sum payment of $68,104.98 cash, is final.ly online, as a teaser, promising to launch a service with free access to health, life, auto and home insurance quotes from the network of agents and brokers across the country.

So far, the site is repeating the jingle of insureme.com - "Free Insurance Quotes | Auto, Homeowners, Life and Health Insurance | InsureMe".

The latter is still the number one in Google search for "insure+me", but with a bit of search engine optimisation (SEO) it may easily change, of course.

Then, branding wise, insure.me looks simpler and hence easy to remember. Insurance marketeers will love it for its higher recall rate.

loan.me

In September 2008, this domain was purchased at the first dot me Moniker auction by Nikolas Gough from Denmark for $15k. Loans.me is still reserved as a premium one by the dot me registry. Prior to this, number of "loans" were grabbed at the land rush:

• studentloans.me ($620) + studentloan.me ($305)
• personalloan.me ($100) + personalloans.me ($705)
• paydayloan.me ($605) + paydayloans.me ($175)
• autoloan.me (reserved as premium) + autoloans.me ($505)
• carloan.me (reserved as premium) + carloans.me ($205)
• loan2.me ($100) + loanto.me ($305)
• loan4.me ($175) + loanfor.me ($100)
• ...

Probably, the best of all is loan4.me as in English, word "loan" is mostly used as a noun and less of a verb. On the ".me" ground, an English noun sounds more natural.ly with "...4.me" and a verb without "4".

Apparent.ly, the winner of the "loan4.me" auction had failed to pay within 72 hours and the registry has reserved the domain for a later premium auction. Today, this leaves "loanfor.me" registered by Caroline Jenson from California, currently parked at GoDaddy, as the best loan jingle on the market. N.B., there is also loan-for.me acquired for $39.98 by Sergey Baykin from Moscow (currently parked at Dynadot).

As one can see, there is no need to pay a fortune, for a good domain name.

There are also loanme.com and loan4me.com, but as they have been parked for years, expect little progress, especially now with the new ".me" kids on the market.

remortgage.me

Acquired just for $2K, remortgage.me can grab another huge market, as a typical mortgage lives for less than five years. Consumer banking fact: although people mortgage their homes for decades, they usually shop now-and-then at different banks in search of lower rates. At least, in British and Irish markets, obvious.ly, remortgage.me represents a greater brand value than that of mortgage.me (not yet released by the Montenegrin registry anyway).

On iluvdotme.com discussion forum they also mention unmortgage.me and demortgage.me (the last one is still available on the primary market, so hurry up if you are interested).

However, they have a major flaw: these are not genuine English terms. For both of them Google provides us with less then 5000 hits (source: unmortgage@google and demortgage@google) some being typos and some are just invented jingles, meaningless from the marketing and branding prospective. This concept hardly existed before.The only way to "demortgage" is either to repay the loan or to default. Both require practically no financial assistance but a legal advice.

With remortgage.com and demortgage.com parked and demortgage.us, demortgage.info, and demortgage.biz untouched, these two stand little chances.

Google Insight

Below is the list of popular keywords, according to Google Insight tool:

• mortgage = (71%)
• loan = (49%)
• debt = (16%)
• insure = (1%)

These numbers represent consumers' interest in various financial products they search for online.

Looks like .me buyers got this trend completely wrong. The price they paid for the corresponding domains is negatively correlated with the keywords' popularity. Shouldn't it be other way around?

Short link: Copy - http://links2.me/~uh11$3R

Posted on December 29th, 2008 • Category: .BIZ, .COM, .INFO, .ME, Discussions, Examples • Tags: branding, finance, insure, loan, Marketing, mortgage, remortgage. • RSS feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed