A Truly Foolish Domain Name

In honour of April Fools' Day, I thought I'd share with you one of the most foolish domain names I've come across so far this year.

I discovered this little gem when I was driving around one rainy night in Los Angeles. While stopped at a red light, I looked up and saw a large billboard ad for a vehicle donation charity.

I couldn't believe what I saw...

(Apologies in advance; because of the rain my photos are not great.)

It's a bit hard to make out, but according to this billboard the domain name for this organization is:

kars-4-kids.org

That's right, "kars" with a "k", plus not just one but TWO dashes, and all ending in a .org domain extension.

Good luck trying to remember this domain name!

Thankfully, I had a camera with me to record the domain name, so when I got back to my computer I typed in www.kars-4-kids.org.

Guess what? The billboard got it wrong!

kars-4-kids.org is not owned by the organization, and is in fact just a parked domain.

The organization can actually be found at kars4kids.org (without the dashes).

Somebody please fire the genius who thought it would be a great idea to add a few dashes to the domain name and then spend who knows how much plastering it on billboards all over the country.

But it gets even better, or worse, depending on how you look at it...

What if you didn't happen to have a photo of the billboard and had to rely on memory? Hey, it could happen.

Say, for instance, when you next found yourself at a computer you typed in carsforkids.org.

Turns out that carsforkids.org takes you to a different organization doing roughly the same thing: charitable donations of cars for kids!

I kid you not.

Comments

[Terra Andersen]

The funny thing is that I've seen these exact same ads on various websites... with the WRONG web address on them.. crazy! Someone needs to get fired over there!

[Michael Baynger]

Bill, it’s certainly a shocker to see such high priced marketing go to waste like that. I can’t help but be reminded of occasions when certain kinds of micro-management biz execs take it upon themselves to ‘design’ a software application rather than let qualified people do the job. The results are often as disastrous.

BTW, my immediate subjective reading of the billboard (which is what kicks in when passing by such things at great speed) was not about donations to a charity but about spoiled kids driving to school in motorized toy vehicles. Granted this interpretation was influenced by catching a glimpse of the city name and, as we all know, la-is-a-great-big-freeway.com.

MB
p.s. I have to say this - by some strange alignment of cosmic forces we both posted about dysfunctional billboards this week. Take a look at my site for more billboard fun...