ONE OF THE few hot spots in this year's sanitized lineup of Super Bowl commercials featured a brunette who had trouble keeping everything tucked into a tight-fitting white tank top.
If you saw it, you would definitely remember her. So here's the bonus question: What company did she represent and what does that company sell?
That's a little tougher, right? Considering its prominent display on the front of the model's well-filled tank top, the company's name may be somewhat memorable - GoDaddy.com. As for the company's line of business, GoDaddy.com is an Internet domain registrar.
So how many of you know what an Internet domain registrar actually does? Not many, I'd bet. Obviously, the company isn't peddling anything with the mass market appeal of cold beer, hot cars, slick cameras, fast food, soft drinks and other traditional Super Bowl fare.
So why would a company that 99.9 percent of the world has never heard of, and whose business 99.99 percent of the world doesn't understand, come up with $4.2 million for air time on the most expensive TV broadcast of the year?
The answer is an interesting tale of the backroom workings of the Internet and the millions of dollars at stake in its most obscure corners.
First things first: An Internet domain registrar is a company that has the right to register with the Internet's governing authority the names that businesses, institutions and individuals use for their Web sites.
They're part of a system developed so that Web surfers don't have to remember the real Internet address of the sites they want to contact.
Those addresses consist of a long string of numbers and periods that virtually no one can remember. For example, if you want to search the Web, it's a lot easier to type www.google.com into a browser's address bar than it is remember Google's real address, which is http://216.239.37.99. So Google.com is the search engine's domain name.
Obviously, these names have to be unique, and they can also be very valuable. During the early days of the Internet gold rush in the late 1990s, the wise guys who recognized the commercial potential of the Web snapped up popular, generic domain names such as shopping.com and later sold them for millions. Big corporations, many of which were slow to catch on, wound up battling for and ultimately winning the right to use the trademark-based Web addresses that early birds had snapped up in hopes of a quick score.
