I was just watching a DVD of the second season of Alias (which, by the way, is just as crappy as the first season). In it, a character mentioned the name of their webpage and I remembered it to look at later. The page didn’t really bring anything up except a silly search engine that didn’t give any results unless you searched for a website that had bought an advertisement on the site.

My question is this, why don’t companies ever buy these websites to point to their sites as part of their advertising budget? I can’t imagine that I’m the only one who looks for these sites, and I know that these fake website names are mentioned on TV or DVDs fairly regularly.

I did a quick Google search on domain names on TV shows and I
found this blurb about Will and Grace and the Simpson’s. Apparently, TV shows have started to buy the sites mentioned on their program, and this seems like a bright idea – it reinforces the alternate universe that the show inhabits. This marketing department/ writing team synergy must be fairly new, though, because it didn’t apply to Conspiracychick.com, and it didn’t apply to another domain mentioned on a syndicated episode of the Simpson’s, the name of which I unfortunately (and conveniently hee hee hee) can’t remember.

This link is especially worth clicking on:
http://www.springfieldisforgayloversofmarriage.com/wiggum.htm