Vine.com Rebrands as VineMarket.com

VineMarket.comI was checking out Vine.com, a website owned by Quidsi (which is owned by Amazon), and I noticed that the company appears to have been rebranded very recently. Instead of the Vine.com logo, the new logo is for VineMarket.com. On the website’s  about us page  and footer, the company now refers to itself as VineMarket.com instead of Vine.com. The website still resolves to Vine.com, and VineMarket.com forwards to Vine.com. Vine.com was launched in 2012.

I did some searching to see when this rebranding may have occurred, and here is what I found:

  • According to the Archive.org entry on March 6, 2014, the footer on the Vine.com website stated, “Vine.com is operated by Quidsi Solutions LLC.
  • According to the Archive.org entry on March 7, 2014, the footer on the Vine.com website stated, “VineMarket.com is operated by Quidsi Solutions LLC.
  • According to DomainTools, on December 24, 2013, the domain name was registered publicly at Enom.
  • According to DomainTools, on December 26, 2013, the domain name went private, and it appears to have transferred to GoDaddy. The domain name is still registered under privacy.

Interestingly, the VineMarket.com domain name is listed for sale on Sedo with a buy it now price of $4,400. Because of this rebranding, I assume that is an old or invalid listing. I didn’t see a record of this domain sale, so I assume a transaction was consummated privately for an undisclosed amount of money.

If I had to guess, I would say that this rebranding may have been undertaken due to confusion with Twitter’s Vine video sharing platform, which is found on Vine.CO. If you ask a group of Internet savvy people if they know about “Vine,” the majority of people who know of the brand name would probably  have mentioned the video sharing company rather than the retailer. In fact, if you search “Vine” on Google, Vine.CO is the top result at the moment. I would imagine that it would be difficult for Vine Market to compete for that brand ranking.

This rebranding begs the question of whether the Vine video sharing platform will try and purchase the Vine.com domain name from Quidsi.  The  Vine.com domain name  is one of the oldest domain namres registered, and it was acquired in 2012.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

12 COMMENTS

    • If I had to guess, I would say no. I think losing the Vine.com domain name could hurt the retailer, and since Quidsi is owned by Amazon, the income derrived from a domain name sale would likely be negligible.

      I will monitor the domain name to see if there are any changes.

  1. This is one of the times when a 4 figure name is better than a 7 figure name. You know exactly what Vine Market is before you even go there but what is Vine if you didn’t know what it was already. Personally I would think they sold Wine but there isn’t a bottle anywhere to be found for sale.

    Google loves brands and the Vine Market name is great for a Whole Foods style online grocery store. Much better than the singular Vine. One word premium names are great when you are going to use it to it’s full marketing potential but this particular business is 100% internet driven so having such a great premium name in my opinion doesn’t matter. People will remember the name Vine Market because of associational thinking but won’t remember the name Vine as easily even though it’s short.

    I hope Vine.co does buy Vine.com so we won’t have to read those ridiculous posts by Morgan about how you don’t need a .com domain to build your business. Vine.co is his poster child of validation to use a .ME, .CO. .IO etc……even though 99% of all successful ventures begin with a .com and those that fail most of the time are on alternative extensions.

    The bottom line is if you start your business on anything other than a .com than you are instantly taking two steps back. The key to any business is to keep it simple and remove as many obstacles and hurdles as possible when building that business and using an alternative extension is a huge and sometimes an insurmountable obstacle.

    • “I hope Vine.co does buy Vine.com so we won’t have to read those ridiculous posts by Morgan about how you don’t need a .com domain to build your business. ”

      I think we can all agree that Vine has done a pretty good job of building its brand and business on Vine.CO.

  2. “I think we can all agree that Vine has done a pretty good job of building its brand and business on Vine.CO.”

    Vine.co only became successful because of the Twitter founders and the behemoth Twitter. Without those two things we all would be saying what the hell is Vine.

    • I think it had more to do with another brand coming out and using it than the issue of branding with a 7 figure name though. That means, IMO, if there wasn’t a video service with the same name, the Vine.com brand would be superior to VineMarket.com.

    • Two stalls is a market place,although video sharing is marketing to a very different crowd than the brand-conscious amazon consumer. For me Vine is always cognitive with wine and is a great domain for a country /area producer vertical.

  3. Diapers.com, Soap.com, Wag.com, YoYo.com, Casa.com, Vine.com, AfterSchool.com, Bookworm.com, Look.com, Familyhood.com and BeautyBar.com. These are all owned by Quidsi and the only oddball domain they own that didn’t describe exactly or at least give you a tip of what it was is Vine.com. This was purely a branding move and I don’t think it has anything to do with Vine.co

    I know you like exact match domains as brands but personally I don’t. I would go to Zappos before I went to Shoes.com. I would go to Priceline or Expedia before I would go to Hotels.com. I don’t like generic words as brands. A generic word can only stand on it’s own when coupled with an extension such as .com. You can’t tell someone on the street to go to Hotels, Shoes, Coats etc….unless you specified that you were talking about the internet and then automatically they would associate it in their head with .com but if I said to visit Zappos, Expedia, etc…..they don’t have to associate the brand with an extension.

    If you went into a mall would you visit the store who’s sign said Shoes or Zappos? Office supplies or Staples? Electronics or Best Buy? I would choose the brand every time because most already associate generic words with cheap flea market products. Just my opinion.

    • The EMD’s that carry significant weight are the likes of Care (dot) com , another underrated/unused area is the EMD portfolios that can carry a new brand on quality, authoritative sites that are specific to the EMD root domain, even though this means the catch 22 of having to pay top $ for the domain portfolio it is financially better long term value than what you will pay the google ferryman.

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