Subdomains and the future: A few thoughts on iReport.CNN.com

Rick Schwartz broke his blogging silence of five weeks yesterday – much to my delight and that of others.

His subject of discussion – the dropping of iReport.com in favor of the subdomain iReport.cnn.com by the CNN Network – offered the opportunity for a stimulating discussion.

The sale of iReport.com for a reported $750,000 ranks amongst Rick’s top sales; it’s also apparently a sale that required dealing with the CNN Network executives in a manner that differs from most end-buyer deals.

So Rick is arguing that the future will be in subdomains; the switch of iReport to become a subdomain of CNN.com appears to be “proof”, due to the apparent large monetary value iReport.com carries.

And yet, several other sales of domains, some in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, were silently changed into subdomains of the brand they represent.

The reason this is happening is simple: a corporation with an established brand, such as CNN.com will use the full domain such as iReport.com to establish a trend and thus get visitors accustomed to it, while remaining in the background as the primary destination.

Ideally, a product or service needs its own namespace independently of the corporate identity. Products and services come and go, some fail and some succeed. Domains as assets usually maintain their branding long after a domain is removed from existence.

Thus, the notion that subdomains are the future isn’t accurate in itself, in my opinion. Subdomains have been around forever, since communities and active web sites offered this kind of access in the early days of the commercial Internet. Using subdomains for products isn’t new and isn’t the focus of everyday domaining, or we would be all registering free .tc domains or other exotic TLDs.

For the purpose it serves, iReport.cnn.com is a fine transition from a standalone domain into the integrated news network of the brand it spawned from. Rick’s ability to sell an eventual brand to a major news network is admirable; the decision by CNN to transition to a CNN.com subdomain, four years later, is a classic case of the board of directors moving to condense all services under the CNN brand. It makes perfect sense from a marketing standpoint as well.

And that’s not bad at all, as it shows that it’s important to establish, maintain and expand on one’s brand and products, utilizing generics or brandable domains; not all of them will eventually be dropped and not all of them will be turned into entities under the corporate umbrella.

What matters is that Rick Schwartz had a grand sale with the domain iReport.com and that its current use as a redirect makes perfect sense in the world of branding and asset integration.