Brands fail to bag Myspace domain extensions

Have you bothered to register a personalised URL for your company on Myspace? If not, you’re not on your own.

Major brands such as McDonalds, Cingular, Nike and Pepsi – as well as Myspace itself – appear to have been too slow after the site allowed users to create their own extensions to Myspace.com.

According to SocialNext, Myspace says it won’t remove users from URLs that include trademarked brands, even though it owns and controls those domains.

Clearly, rogue ownership of these extensions could be a problem if companies want to market to Myspace’s membership – and, as Search Engine Journal points out, could pose a risk to their brands.

It will be interesting to see if companies and advertisers start to put pressure on Myspace to change its policy, and whether they are a bit quicker when similar moves are taken by other social networking sites.  

Of course Myspace might be teeing up a sort of YouTube strategy whereby it allows brands to get into bed with it, by opening 'channels'.

While the URL extension might be off limits, the obvious solution seems to put the brand names before the Myspace domain, eg http://coke.myspace.com. For a price, naturally.

What's the betting we see that before the end of the year?

Also, while we’re on the subject of URLs, it’s about time Myspace sorted out this problem with Myspace.co.uk (slightly fruity / NSFW).