you really should see the 'sample' emails they said mistaken users had sent to them: http://www.utube.com/pdf/ComplaintAttachments.pdf [PDF]

Do you blame them? I think they over-reacted claiming foul against YouTube.com, but I have to give them credit for taking advantage of an otherwise bad situation. If nothing else, maybe it'll pay for over-used bandwidth?

unreal yet extremely smart.

> Do you blame them?

Not really, it's their site, though I wonder if they don't care about "normal" customers coming to their website, seeing webcam girls and p0ker links and undeclared ads and stuff? I think the whole thing is really funny considering they were suing about being confused with YouTube before. (Whatever happened to that court case, does anyone know?)

It's a half-parked domain :-)
In the emails, the last one actually put "Youtube rox" so how comes he didn't realise he was on the wrong site? From that I'd assume he'd been to YouTube before and would realise it was a completely different site.

I noticed the guy in the last email spelled youtube correctly in it, but put his email as from utube.com. How could someone be so ignorant that if it is called youtube, it won't be at utube.com?

I found everything i wanted @ the utube.com search!

I don't know why they didn't do this earlier, it was the obvious thing to do wasn't it? The court case is a ridiculous idea, no-one should attempt to turn people away from a domain as there's always an opportunity there... Personally though I think the search engine they have made is quite poor, whatever I search for always pulls up a "No Results Found" and ads for the same 3 videos and when clicked on, they don't open (they are broken links).

Additionally, surely they would have been wiser to use a splash page with the search on, and a button to enter the "Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation" main website. I'm in agreement with you Philipp that I'm surprised as a company they don't mind their customers seeing these sort of spamy search links. In my opinion this damages the perceived brand image from their customers perspective without a shadow of a doubt.

There's no such thing as bad traffic :-)

"There's no such thing as bad traffic :-)"

Yes there is if you work as a Coolwebsearch/CWS affiliate

While I agree that they are allowed to do this and it's quite clever of them I think it will damage their claim for money from Google.

If they are using it to their advantage they then can't claim that it's causing them a problem. The way I see it, and the way I presume Google does, it's one or the other. It's either a problem for uTube or an advantage.

I would build utube.com into video site and move the tube business to a different domain.

There will always be people who misspell things, especially domain names. Add to that today's tendency of people to type in "text/SMS speak" you'll inevitably get some writing "you" as "u". What's for a company that owns utube.com to do, then?

I agree, a court case is silly (and costly). It's a better move to take advantage of the situation and earn a few bucks off it--hopefully that's enough to cover for the bandwidth bills that the added traffic is costing them.

As for the execution, though, now that's a different story.

[Signature URL removed – Tony]