>By doing this they are breaking millions of links
But are they? I don't know how to search for pages that link to gu.com because the Google link: prefix doesn't work anymore, but up until a few days ago the gu.com domain appears to have been used to immediately redirect to the main theguardian.com site. Perhaps it was rare for users to post a gu.com link because they would copy whatever was in their browser address bar, which would not be a gu.com address after the instant redirect?
With browsers all now doing 'smart' URL searches from the address bar, and autocompleting domain names, maybe this shows that a short domain is not as valuable as it used to be? Particularly for a company like The Guardian which is already well known at its normal longer domain name
That could mean the domain is much more valuable to another company than it was to the Guardian, so it might be smart for them to sell it? Maybe they just couldn't find a way to monetize it that was worth more than $2.5 mil for them? As time goes by, maybe the domain was in fact getting less valuable?
It would be interesting to know how much The Guardian originally paid for gu.com
Yes, Google indexed many gu.com site hits, so then I believe there must have been a link to those pages somewhere and sometime which the Google crawler found. But searching for those short gu.com URLs now shows no external page hits on Google. (try searching for "gu.com/p/3menc" or "gu.com/p/cqekc" for instance)
But are they? I don't know how to search for pages that link to gu.com because the Google link: prefix doesn't work anymore, but up until a few days ago the gu.com domain appears to have been used to immediately redirect to the main theguardian.com site. Perhaps it was rare for users to post a gu.com link because they would copy whatever was in their browser address bar, which would not be a gu.com address after the instant redirect?
With browsers all now doing 'smart' URL searches from the address bar, and autocompleting domain names, maybe this shows that a short domain is not as valuable as it used to be? Particularly for a company like The Guardian which is already well known at its normal longer domain name
That could mean the domain is much more valuable to another company than it was to the Guardian, so it might be smart for them to sell it? Maybe they just couldn't find a way to monetize it that was worth more than $2.5 mil for them? As time goes by, maybe the domain was in fact getting less valuable?
It would be interesting to know how much The Guardian originally paid for gu.com
Very interesting anyway, thanks for posting this!