In 2005, when the video-sharing site YouTube.com was created, another piping company closed down. What's the connection? Well, it's simple. The company's Website was called Utube.com. This posed a real problem because most Internet users, not knowing how to correctly spell the name of the website with the red logo, were typing Utube rather than Youtube on their keyboards (according to the phonetics of the brand.)
When Utube found their site saturated due to the excessive influx of Internet users, they filed a complaint asking YouTube to change their domain name, but to no avail.
The Utube group, with its 17 employees, indicated that over several months the site had received millions of visitors. In August alone, 68 million people logged onto Utube.com.
This record had made it one of the most popular industrial sites in the world. However, due to page loading bugs and other problems with the site, the company lost many customers.
Ralph Birkins, president of Universal Tube, explains: "We had to migrate our site five times in a row to keep up with the influx of visitors on youtube.com."
So in October 2005, Utube.com closed and was looking for a new web space to host its pipe catalog. From now on Universal Tube is available at this address: http://www.universaltube.com/index.html.
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