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Syntax Errors
The Web surfers who go looking for videos on YouTube and instead land on Utube.com are an outspoken and frustrated bunch. Here are some of the messages Ralph Girkins of Universal Tube has found in his in box.
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Can You Spot the Real Utube?
Millions of Web surfers couldn't, so now there's a lawsuit.
Published August 2007
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BUY A REPRINTRalph Girkins, CEO of Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment, has been doing business online since the mid-1990s and has fielded angry e-mails before. But nothing prepared him for the rant that landed in his in box last October: "Where the f--- are all the videos??? 1.5 billion for this piece of s--- website? Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) got taken!"
The writer, who referred to himself as "Tony Soprano," apparently had confused Universal Tube's website, Utube.com, with that of YouTube, the popular video-sharing site that was acquired by Google last October. So instead of finding an ever-changing archive of hundreds of millions of professional and amateur video clips, the angry Web surfer landed on "the original pipe and tube machinery site."
And he wasn't alone. Since last fall, more than 100,000 Web surfers a day have landed on Utube when they wanted to check out YouTube. (For a time, Utube.com crashed almost every day.) Nearly a year later, the traffic is just as heavy. Now the Perrysburg, Ohio-based company, a reseller of machinery used to make industrial tubes, has filed a lawsuit over the domain-name confusion, seeking unspecified damages from YouTube. "We could go to another URL, change our ads," says Girkins. "But why do I have to do that? This URL is mine."
Companies, of course, clash over domain names all the time. In 2001, a small cartoon and game development outfit in Chicago called iToons began receiving calls from people looking for iTunes, Apple's then-new music downloading site. The company dashed off a letter raising trademark concerns, but the flirtation with legal action was brief, says iToons co-founder Kevin Larson. Given Apple's legal resources, Larson decided he had "no hope of getting our brand back." So he changed his company's name to Snap2Play.
It sounds amusing, but the confusion has been no joke for Ralph Girkins. Universal Tube deals in refurbished large tube-forming equipment, which is bought by pipe and tube manufacturers. The average transaction at the company is $50,000, and some machinery costs as much as $500,000; sales hit about $12 million in 2006. Until last fall, Universal Tube's website received so few visitors that Girkins never even bothered tracking them. Clearly, Utube.com was never intended to be a mass market proposition.
Then, soon after Google purchased YouTube for a headline-making $1.65 billion, the e-mail started to pour in. One visitor, a detective in Melbourne, Australia, accused Utube.com of running a video that "may contain child porn." (See "Syntax Errors.") Girkins's 15 employees found themselves struggling to keep up with the volume of complaints.
