Mum.com

Mum.com is a new blog with articles of interest to mums. The articles on the site are an eclectic mix, ranging from teenage drug use to looking after hamsters. Most of them are bullet pointed for easy reading. We will be adding more articles regularly throughout January 2010, and broadening the scope of the blogs to include recipes and product reviews.

The site was launched on 29 December 2009,  it’s currently a customised Wordpress template but the design will progress as our blog library, traffic, page rank, and product offering develops during 2010. In the meantime, we are looking for development partners, content providers, and advertisers who recognise the potential of the Mum.com brand.

Mum’s The Word

Mum is short for Mummy or Mother. It is most commonly used in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Holland, and parts of the US and Canada. In the US, most people  say Mom, and in Canada people use both and sometimes say Mum but write Mom. Within the UK, there are regional variations, some people in the West Midlands say Mom and in parts of the north of England and Wales, Mam and Mammy are popular alternatives to Mum.

The word Mother is believed to derive from the first syllable spoken by babies; “Ma”, combined with the kinship suffix “ter”, also found in brother, father, and sister. The original Latin Mater evolved into the English word Mother.

Other Indo-European variations include the Greek Meter, as in metropolis, the mother city, the German Mutter, French Mère, Serbian Majka, Russian Mat’, Italian Materi,  Spanish Madre, Portuguese Mãe, Danish Moder, Dutch and Afrikaans Moeder, Norwegian and Swedish Mor, Icelandic Móðir, Irish Máthair, Hindi Mataji, Gujarati Maataa, Farsi (Persian) Madar, and Pashto (Afghanistan) Mor.

The Buying Power of Mums

A study by Comscore found 4.6m UK mums spent an average of 26.7 hours shopping online in June 2009. Mike Read, SVP and Managing Director of comScore Europe added, “Mums in the UK not only spend a great deal of time online each month, but they also control the purse strings for many families. It’s clear from their heavy visitation of retail sites, that mums represent an important shopping segment , so it is critical for marketers and retailers to understand how to reach this audience online and influence their spending behavior – both online and offline.”

Mum.com Domain Name

Mum.com was registered on 31 October 1994, making it the oldest generic domain in its category, ahead of Mom.com, registered on 5 December 1994 and Baby.com, registered on 10 April 1995. Mom.com is owned by CafeMom.com, the 819th ranked website by traffic in the US according to Alexa.com. Baby.com is owned by Johnson and Johnson, the US pharmaceutical, medical devices, and consumer packaged goods manufacturer.

In domaining terminology, Mum.com is a generic LLL.com. These are very rare and coveted 3 letter .com domain names. For example, Fly.com was sold for $1.8m to TravelZoo in June 2009. Generic .com domains are sought after for many reasons. They convey market leadership, credibility and prestige for established bricks and mortar businesses, are useful as standalone or sub-brands for online businesses, and attract direct type in traffic, for example 1 in 6 site visits originates from direct navigation rather than revisits, link following, or search engines.

Sometimes the sale of generic .com domains make the headlines, for example Toys R Us paid $5m for Toys.com in February 2009. Other times, generic .com domain sales are shrouded in non-disclosure agreements. For example, Microsoft acquired Office.com in June 2009 from ContactOffice Group for an undisclosed sum.