After all the trouble with Bodog losing its online domain name, the company has decided to re-brand to BodogLife. The company lost the ability to keep the Bodog domain name due to a legal dispute, which resulted in Bodog having to host its site on the temporary domain NewBodog.com. The BodogLife name is looking to be its new permanent domain and brand name as the company is looking to recover from such a devastating loss.
The site lost a large amount of traffic, as the site picked up lots of visitors from Google through search terms like ‘online poker’. Because the company had lost its domain and the site was no longer hosted at Bodog.com, Google wiped the site of its index and so the site lost all of its rankings, which would have cost a lot of money for them to be there in the first place. This loss of traffic meant that the sportsbook, casino and Poker room stopped receiving as many real money players, and so there would be a hefty loss in the financial department.
It has been suggested however that this rebranding has been set up to make it appear as though the company has lost interest in reclaiming their old domain, whilst they think up a way to get it back for as cheaply as possible. The company would have had to pay $49 million to keep the domain, but they believed that they could get away with not paying the fee and still keep the domain, but this obviously was not the case. It was not in Calvin Ayre’s interest to fork out so much money for something they believe they didn’t need to pay, but he and the company are now paying for it.
In my opinion, I believe that Calvin Ayre should have paid out the fee to keep the domain, or he should be looking to get the domain back as quickly as possible. This is because people are not going to refer to the new company as BodogLife in a hurry, and it would be so much easier (and money saving) to just pay the fee and get back to normal business. All of the switching around will have been very time consuming and costly, and I’m sure the amount of money spent and lost since the switching has far exceeded $49 million. I’m fairly sure that by the end of the year you will be able to find Bodog back on its original domain, and it will be business as usual once again.
