While Internet companies elsewhere are desparate to market themselves well enough to drive traffic to their site, the Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation of Perrysburg, Ohio might be experiencing a case of tunnel-vision (pun intended). They do not want YouTube users accidentally coming to their site, apparently because it is too much for their hosting provider to handle.

They complained a few weeks back that the site was being downed by heavy traffic as users looking for YouTube landed on their site instead, presumably by typing the wrong domain name. This downtime cost them a great deal of money in lost customers, they said. How big was the traffic spike? They claim unique visitors went from 1,500 to over 2 million per month. UTube has been forced to move hosts 5 times to cope with the traffic, with bandwidth bills increasing by a factor of 100, they claim. They registered the domain way back in 1996, so they have every claim to it – what’s more, they also argue that the UTube name is strongly tied to their identity.

I understand their concern about the site being down, but is that really the problem? What would the increase in sales/conversion be if the site were able to stay up? It just makes me wonder if they realize that they are being seen by a much larger potential customer base now? In fact, I was just looking for a tube to buy the other day…