Fred Destin

Has to be the news of the day, which I got through my great information service MarketClusters (disclosure: Founder Nick Gregg owes me a beer):

Tube and piper maker UTube is suing video-sharing site YouTube for using its name, according to mashable.com. The pipe and machinery business claims its website is constantly being taken offline due to traffic from users looking for YouTube, costing it lost customers due to lack of online presence. UTube claims its number of unique visitors has increased from around 1,500 to over 2m a month, forcing it to move domain hosts five times to cope with the traffic. The company says their bandwidth bills have also increased one hundredfold since the launch of the video sharing site. No financial details of the suit were disclosed.

Utube was a mover and shaker on Alexa as noted recently.  Not everyone is happy about the UTube acquisition !  But I will bet you that everyone in the tube business knows this company by now, so great marketing !  What they should really do is a commercial deal with YouTube to host a video on the website and redirect the traffic, and for that produce a nice custom video ad for YouTube (with a pre-roll ad to defray the bandwidth costs), and turn this into a cash neutral marketing machine for them.

technorati tags:utube, youtube