Geeking out - who owns certain pet insurance website domains?

I was playing around with Whois - a fun service for geeks who want to know who has registered a particular domain name. I figured I would take a look at who owns some hypothetical pet insurance domains - and what fun it turned out to be.

Let's start with www.purinapetinsurance.com - an obvious (but wrong) candidate for Purina to launch with. Who owns it? Strangely enough Veterinary Pet Insurance (VPI - largest pet insurer in the US) [if you are wondering, the Purina product is going out under www.PurinaCare.com.] Perhaps they have this because they used to have a relationship with Purina many years ago.

Moving right along, how about Walmart Pet Insurance - we all know Wal*mart has been getting its fingers into the financial services arena. No reason they wouldn't consider pet insurance for their stable of products. Turns out that has been snapped up by the Hartville Group (third largest pet insurer in the US.)

Along the same lines, what about Target Pet Insurance? Pet Protect has it (a smaller pet insurer that stopped selling new business in 2006.)

Very interesting! I wonder what the motivation for holding these urls is.

My question to my geekier friends out there - can you get big money out of holding branded domain names like this?

By the way, for those of you looking for some pet insurance web real estate to invest in, www.AmazonPetInsurance.com, www.BlueCrossPetInsurance.com, and www.CostcoPetInsurance.com are all free - for now.

Dig in!

Update: Looks like AmazonPetInsurance.com was snapped up by a Hong Kong firm July 2008.

Comments

[MikeTheActuary]

From what I understand, there is some potential income from cybersquatting, although you're gambling that the company you're targeting will actually want the domain, and won't seek legal or administrative relief to transfer the domain to them without paying your ransom.

I think the larger potential source of income is from those folks who acquire and then park their domains. Put up some adsense ads, and you potentially can make a profit on an otherwise small investment.

[Jonathan]

Hey, there's nothing geeky about a little WHOIS lookup, am I right?

[Laura]

Nothing geeky at all - LOL!