I'm not perfectly clear on the technical distinction, but I get the feeling that once Thanksgiving weekend has come and gone in the US (ours falls a little earlier here in Canada), it is officially considered the "holiday season," at least as far as the buying and selling is concerned.
In the offline retail world that tends to mean mall Santas, sparkling oversized tree ornaments and "door crasher" specials or "holiday savings."
Lets set the whole crass-commercialization-of-the-holidays conversation aside for the moment and agree that the holiday season is big business for folks who make their living selling things.
Intuitively, that wouldn't necessarily include Web hosting providers, since the sort of thing they sell can't exactly be wrapped up and stuck under a tree. But that hasn't stopped Web hosts from hopping on the annual "holiday shopping" bandwagon, in some cases trying to position Web hosting itself as a gift idea.
The simplest cases make the most obvious sense, such as AIT's offer of a free PC or a PDA with the purchase of a hosting account. Rather than offer hosting as the gift, the company is offering a tangible, unwrappable device to supplement a new account.
It is perhaps not a perfect execution - but certainly a logical one. I once got a DVD player when I signed up for a cell phone plan, and I'll admit, I gave it to my mother as a gift. She liked it.
More interesting to me, however, are the companies, such as Dotster and MochaHost, that announced this week they were offering hosting packages designed to be purchased as gifts. The idea is a bit out-there, if you ask me. And the companies would seem to agree, implicitly, by taking pains to explain the value of the gift of hosting in their press releases.
Dotster explains: a Web hosting account is the "ultimate Internet gift," because it requires no shipping or wrapping, and it takes the hassle out of holiday shopping.
All true facts - but they don't exactly scream "thoughtful." And I have yet to meet a child with visions of "domain w/url forwarding and email forwarding for one year" dancing through his or her head.
SiteGround even went so far as to take the cost out of holiday shopping, giving each of its customers five $20 gift certificates they can spend on themselves or give away to family and friends.
I'm not absolutely certain that the merits of hosting-as-gift are worth debating. I'm sure some people will give it a try. Me, I'll probably stick with CDs, at least for one more year. Frankly, I'm not convinced the reason my friends and family aren't making Web sites isn't because they don't have the hosting.
What I'm really interested in here is the notion of a place for intangible Internet services in the physical world. I mentioned this sort of thing in an earlier post about an idea Paul Engels from Hostopia had for marketing Web hosting services.
Go Daddy got the wheels turning again on this with an announcement that it was offering holiday gift cards, available in values ranging from $2 to $1,000. While they can be delivered by email, Go Daddy is also offering to deliver physical cards that can be wrapped and handed over. While Go Daddy doesn't have quite the selection of, say, Wal-Mart (which, incidentally, has begun sell AT&T brand DSL services in stores), a Go Daddy gift card provides a pretty unique possibility - it takes a domain name (and not an already-registered one) off the Internet and puts it in your hand.
I spoke to Rodney Giles, CEO of Web host eleven2 a few weeks ago, and he mentioned that when his company started out they approached some of the big retail companies with an idea to put a domain registration on a physical card and sell it in stores.
He says he never made a deal, mostly because the retailers weren't eager to deal with a start-up, and I might add that at the time they probably didn't completely understand the potential of what was being proposed.
But I think it's a great idea, and probably a fascinating experiment. Putting a domain registration on a card, would make domains, hosting and Web publishing available to a whole market of people that might, or might not, exist. That is, kids, or other people with no credit card and therefore no means to register a domain name.
I'm sure there might be somebody out there offering hosting on a card, or somebody offering domain registration by personal check. But when the Go Daddy cards start showing up on the shelves at Best Buy, I think that could be a turning point.
Tags: holiday, shopping, marketing, ait, dotster, mochahost, siteground, hostopia, go daddy, eleven2
I think for the average Joe, a domain + web hosting package might be more of a liability than gift. Imagine telling them that "you need to pay $100/year to keep last year's Christmas present".
Also more web sites usually mean more work - learn HTML, learn upload/download, write content, learn image editing, keep scripts secure, etc. Someone might love it, but not me. I hate it when someone gives me jigsaw puzzles as gifts :(
The google apps for domains are a good example.