Every time you want to start a new site, one of the first things you think of is “what domain would be perfect for this project?” You go to you registrar, look up the domain you want and find that it’s taken (98% of the time anyway). You’re next step is to lookup who the owner is so you can buy the domain.
Imagine our surprise we were when we looked up a domain for one of our new projects and found this:
Johnson & Johnson
One Johnson & Johnson Plaza
New Brunswick, NJ 08933
US
+001.7325243245 fax: +001.7325246341
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.JNJ.COM 148.177.2.10
NS3.JNJ.COM 148.177.130.197
NS5.JNJ.COM 148.177.219.1
Johnson & Johnson owns about 20,288 other domains
:( Looks like we’re gonna have to find another domain name.
Makes you wonder how many other large corporation are getting into the domain game. It would also be interesting to know if all the companies in the Fortune 500 are using their official company info for domains or if they are registering under a pseudonym, DBA, or private registration. The point here is that larger companies are starting to understand how this “Internet thing” actually works.
6 Responses to “Johnson & Johnson - A Player in the Domain Game”
wow. any good ones?
It doesn’t surprise me that J&J recognize the value in those sorts of intangible assets. Some of their brick-and-mortar marketing strategies strike me as exhibiting the particularly rich, nuanced understanding of consumer behavior that drives success online. They utilize package design split-testing, putting items on the same shelves with basically the same ingredients, but different packaging, pricing each differently and doing large scale comparative analysis of sales in different regions based on price and packaging. They’re always creating new metrics to analyze their sales from as many different perspectives as possible. Wal-Mart understands this as well.
Seriously, next time you’re at a grocery store, go to the aisle with the hand soap. If you start looking at labels, you’ll see that a majority of the different brands on the shelves are all owned by J&J. Anyway, enough ramble, but it doesn’t surprise me that they own that many domains.
Hah, as soon as I saw this post I got reminded of an episode of You Look Nice Today where they looked up weird domain names and found most of them were owned by J&J
A good example is coloncam.com, owned by J&J:
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/coloncam.com
They own some other weird ones in the domain of anal cavities.
1. Wise companies from Top500 use domain registration to protect their current & future products, trademarks & other assets. That’s the reason for such a high number of owned domains.
2. Large companies have a team dedicated to domains. This team registers both under public handle (these add up to 20 288 in J&J case) and also private handle.
Private handle registrations are used for planned product releases or anything that is not public yet (both stock and competition concerns). These are sometimes also used for registering “typo” domains.
Private registration feature is soon going to completely change the usage of WHOIS in the next 5 years. We won’t be able to “spy” on the large companies or on our competition anymore.
I remember back in the days when domains were free (in the early 90s). The reason that Internic started introducing a fee for them ($100 at that time) was because Unilever sent in 15,000 applications for .com domains - one for every single product of theirs, past, present and future.
They ruined it for us all 
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Yeah J&J own stuff like baby.com, IIRC.