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Branding, websites and the (former) Paramount parks

2006-05-24

By Robert Niles: A quick thought today, inspired by the Cedar Fair/Paramount Parks deal:

Long term, if Cedar Fair drops the "Paramount's" possessive from those parks' names, what happens to the Paramount's Kings Island website?

When I was a kid, living in Indianapolis, in the days before Paramount owned the park, it was known as just "Kings Island." And I suppose a great many people still refer to the park as such and wouldn't miss for a moment Cedar Fair dropping the "Paramount's" from the front of its now-official name.

But Kings Island's website is PKI.com. And, presumably, the "P" would become irrelevant upon a name change. KI.com's owned by an interior design firm. And kingsisland.com's in the hands of a cybersquatter.

Sure, one letter from the Cedar Fair legal team likely obtains that domain. But I'd think Cedar Fair also could bag a nice chunk of cash selling a now-unneeded three-letter dot-com domain. I know, to the average theme park visitor, this topic means little. But as a certified Web geek, I find this stuff interesting. Three-letter dot-com domains don't come available everyday.

Also on this topic, I see that Busch has obtained the buschgardenseurope.com domain that I wrote about earlier. But buschgardensafrica.com appears to remain in the hands of a squatter.

Readers' Opinions

From Jason Goldsmith on May 25, 2006 at 5:45 AM
Good point. And if I remember correctly, Paramount has recently done a redesign of their sites (past couple of years). I wonder if they will just remove "Paramount" parts, or are they going to do a complete redesign to make it look more like the Cedar Fair sites, which could cost a lot if they go through a 3rd party agency.

I would presume they would keep the PKI.com domain for awhile, and just have it redirect to the new domain, since not everyone is as smart as us theme park enthusiast.

In regards to BGT/BGA getting the domain, I figure it's only a matter of time, since they were able to get the BGE one.

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