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YouTube Newbies Clog UTube.com
Flood of traffic caused by a domain-name homophone shuts down an Ohio tube and rollform equipment site.October 13, 2006If the Internet really was a series of pipes and tubes – as U.S. Senator Ted Stevens famously suggested earlier this year – then Ohio-based Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corp. would have been well positioned to handle all the internet traffic it received this week following Google’s eye-opening acquisition of video sharing site YouTube.

As it turns out, the Internet is really a series of cables and routers and the Ohio company, which sells used and remanufactured machinery to make pipes and tubes, was ill-prepared for the flood of traffic it received on its utube.com website. Ralph Girkins, president of Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corporation, said traffic to his site shot through the roof over the past week as huge numbers of confused YouTube wannabes logged on to the internet to check out all those videos they’d heard about on the news. Internet users continued to surf his site looking for videos as late as Friday, and some seemed unable to understand they had reached the wrong website. On Friday alone, Mr. Girkins received more than 100 emails from people asking where the videos were on utube.com.

RED HERRING | YouTube Newbies Clog UTube.com

Funny, the fact that the great unwashed Internet actually emailed the poor, hapless owner of utube.com to ask where the videos where. As if the front page of the website didn’t clue the visitors that they may simply be at the wrong destination. I would think that landing at the Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment site would be a hint that you had the wrong address. Silly internet people.

technorati tags:utube, youtube

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