April 3, 2017 AOL CEO Tim Armstrong announced a new brand to house AOL and Yahoo, Oath.
AOL registered a slew of domain names to back up this announcement but completely failed and didn’t secure Oath.com prior to the announcement, at least according to current whois records.
World Media Group LLC owns Oath.com, not Verizon, AOL or Yahoo… World Media Group is a domain name investment company, that owns many very valuable domain name assets.
That didn’t stop AOL from registering domains related to Oath though:
AOL did register: 0ath.net, 0athllc.com (both zero’s) and many brands they own like AltoByOath.com, AltoFromOath.com, AltoMailByOath.com, AltoMailFromOath.com (AltoMail is owned by AOL), AnOathCompany.com, AOLAndYahoo.com, AOLAanOathBrand.com, AOLanOathCompany.com, AOLaVerizonCompany.com, AOLByOath.com, AOLFromOath.com, AOLOath.com. Then they registered other brand names like AutoblogAnOathCompany.com, AutoblogByOath.com and a few more.
BuildAnOathBrand.com, BuildByOath.com, BuildFromOath.com, CambioAnOathBrand.com, CambioByOath.com, CambioFromOath.com, DesktopOath.com and they kept on registering:
oath.at
oathadvertising.com
oathadvertisinginc.com
oathaim.com
oathalpha.com
oathalto.com
oathamericas.com
oathamericasinc.com
oathamericasllc.com
oathantivirus.com
oathaol.com
oathautoblog.com
oathavdertisinginc.com
oathaverizoncompany.com
oathbrowser.com
oathcambio.com
oathcareers.com
oathclient.com
oathcolon.com
oathdesktop.com
oathemail.com
oathengadget.com
oathengineering.com
oathevents.com
oathfromverizon.com
oathholdings.com
oathholdingsinc.com
oathholdingsllc.com
oathhp.com
oathhuffpost.com
oathkanvas.com
oathlive.com
oathmakers.com
oathmarketing.com
oathmoviefone.com
oathnetworks.com
oathp.com
oathplayer.com
oathpolitics.com
oathsearch.com
oathshield.com
oath.tw
oathsmp.com
oathsucks.com
oathtc.com
oathtechcrunch.com
oathuffpost.com
oathventures.com
oathvideo.com
oathvideos.com
oathyahoo.com
oathbyone.com
pledgeanoath.com
smpoath.com
stylemeprettyanoathbrand.com
stylemeprettybyoath.com
techcrunchanoathbrand.com
techcrunchanoathcompany.com
techcrunchfromoath.com
whatsyouroath.com
yahoobyoath.com
yahoooath.com
www0ath.com
I would think Verizon or AOL or Yahoo was wise enough to secure Oath.com PRIOR to announcing this and whois just doesn’t reflect it yet but the current fact is, the domain is not owned by them according to whois records! This would be a big time fail and surely cause the offering price to skyrocket.
The company failed at many “make sense” registrations as well, like VerizonOath.com, which was registered yesterday, just not by AOL like the others mentioned above.
I wouldn’t say this announcement was as elegant as Carnival Corporation’s brand Ocean and the purchase of Ocean.com to house its brands!
If AOL (Absolutely Outstanding Lunacy) cannot follow the basic rules of branding, what hope do we have that the “mainstream” businesses will?
If they indeed haven’t secured the name, it deserves to be the tragic case of idiocy of 2017… so far.
The CMO of Verizon is going to get canned on the Oath.com miss; just cost the new brand more money than necessary.
More proof that corporate end users are still behind the curve in terms of digital marketing, advertising and branding but the 2017 retail Apocalypse will clear the confusion. The 2nd gold rush for generic EMD/category killing dot-Com domains will be from 2018-2020. All those add dollars moving from traditional TV are moving to digital platforms. All the quality domains will be owned by corporate America and GoDaddy by 2022 for sure. C-Suite will wake up before 2017 closes…
@JR,
All of the domains that I had seen were registered under the AOL brand name, so I would assume that team is taking the lead, at least on the domain name front. Not a very good one to note if they didn’t secure it prior to announcing. In general, Verizon mainly does a very good job at securing the best domain.
As reported somewhere else, Verizon/AOL has secured Oath.com
It isn’t as bad as previously thought…
Kudos to them.